Gem of the Sea
by SomniumAstrum
Summary: Discontinued. It's the first thing I wrote and demonstrates starting with a Mary Sue, learning what a Mary Sue is, and frantically trying to fix the issue before giving up. The writing was actually not that bad, but I wouldn't recommend reading it. Predates the Heroes of Olympus series.
1. The Train of Doom

**Chapter One**

I hefted my poor, beat up suitcase up the stairs and onto the train. I took a glance at the ticket that the guy near the entrance to that train car gave me, and sighed when I realized that it was on the second floor of the train. I had only been on a two floor train a single time before, and that time I had been on the bottom. I really hate heights. I marched up the stairs after depositing my suitcase on the rack near the door. I found my seat, and saw it was near a window. Why? Just why? I plopped down grumpily in my seat, and then closed the little curtain over the window. Eh, it wasn't like I could see any of the lovely view of the train station in West Virginia at three in the morning.

You may be wondering why I could be at this train station in the middle of West Virginia at this time of night. The answer is that for some reason unknown to me, the train from the Chesapeake Bay to West Virginia then one from there to New York was cheaper than one from the Chesapeake Bay right to New York. I guess West Virginia was getting desperate. Besides adding hours to the trip, I also had to sit on the second floor of a train because of it. I was rather tired at the moment. I had taken an incredibly long boat ride from my Aunt's house where I lived back in Aussie to Annapolis, Maryland and then a train to this random station in West Virginia.

That's right, I'm from Australia. I was actually born in the States, but my mum died when I was three and since then my home was in Aussie with my Aunt and Uncle, even though I had spent time as a foreign exchange student in Tokyo, London, Denver, Pittsburgh, and Richmond. Not in any particular order of course. My name is Ula Trent. Yes, I know funny name and all that. I'm not quite sure what my mum was aiming at when she chose my name; though my Aunt tells me it apparently means "Gem of the Sea" in Celtic or whatever. It's not exactly fun for me to be the only person I know with a name that starts with the letter U. What an underrated letter. So if my name makes me stand out anyways, I may as well stick out appearance wise as well instead of trying to blend in. Blending in is an unheard of concept in my book.

I have long, curly black hair that goes down to my waist with some streaks in it. The colored streaks in my hair at the moment were aqua and light green the color of the funny dessert they have at the Eat n' Parks around Pittsburgh. I think it's called Sea Foam or something like that. My eyes tend to be a light blue when I look in the mirrors in bathrooms, but if I see my reflection in the water they end up being whatever color that water is. Unfortunately, that means if we are near some filthy water, my eyes turn the color of filthy water. I'd have to say the weirdest color had to be whenever we all decided to bring in water bottles and put red Crystal Light in our water one day at lunch. The horrid stuff is so watery that it worked and I could have easily passed for a vampire. Huggies, Kool-Aid, Gatorade, and any of those colored vitamin waters have the same effect.

Most of the clothes I wear are either tie-dye or beach clothes. Like at the moment I was wearing a pair of short blue, well… shorts. They said Virginia Beach across the back of them, and trust me, I hadn't been planning on wearing them unless it was over my swimsuit or bikini, but I had just grabbed something clean out of my suitcase at the last train station. I was wearing a t-shirt that said Tokyo on it in Japanese and over that a formerly white zipper hoodie that had been dip dyed different shades of purple by yours truly. The sneakers I was wearing were some beat up Pumas that were white and aqua, and my hair was pulled back in a sloppy braid (I had slept with it in, in addition to having naturally curly hair) with a green scrunchie at the end. We were near the Ohio River, so my eyes were a muddy blue-brown when I saw my reflection in the glass of the window before I had pulled the little curtain over it. Oh, and since my home was back in Australia, that means I have an accent. It really got on my nerves when people asked me to say stuff and then laughed when I said it normally. It's a pain. Like it was fine when I was going to first grade in Denver, but by the time I went to sixth grade a bit over a year ago in Pittsburgh it was _really_ getting old.

I think the thing I missed most about Pittsburgh was the Smiley Cookies from Eat n' Park, even though their Sea Foam dessert from the salad bar creeped me out a touch. Oops, I'm getting off topic again. Blame the ADHD. I also have dyslexia, which is a shame considering I love books. I guess I will have to stick with audio books for the moment. Normal books give me headaches, especially if they're all sad and violent like Call of the Wild or Where the Red Fern Grows, which I was forced to read last year in class. It was torture.

I pushed my carry on bag under the seat in front of me, and when I looked back up, I saw a guy about my age plop down next to the window seat on the far side of the row. There were two seats on each side of the isle, and there looked to be two others with him. The others looked upset that they couldn't sit next to each other. The other two people were a guy and a girl that looked about seventeen and I'd guess that by the way the older guy, who had black hair and green eyes, argued with the guy my age, who had black hair and dark brown eyes, that he was her boyfriend and wanted to sit next to her. The younger guy game them a stubborn look and put his iPod in. The girl had blonde hair and grey eyes, and simply said to him that he would have to sit with "Nico", who I assumed was the younger guy. She sat down next to me, and I busied myself getting the earbuds for my iPod untangled, even though I was pretty sure I wasn't going to listen to any music.

A while later, after I had listened to part of an audio book on my iPod and then tried to fall asleep (and failed), I dragged out a little scrap book I took with me on trips. My Aunt had started the tradition of me in front of landmarks, places I had stayed for an extended period of time, and people I was friends with on my travels. I had kept up with the photos so far, and the album had around 100 photos in it. The blonde girl next to me had been messing with who knows what on her laptop up to that point, but she surprised me by commenting on a photo.

"You have been to the Sidney Opera House?" she asked me.

"Yeah, in fact, I don't live too far away from it," I responded.

That one exchange led to an entire conversation about the pictures where I was in front of monuments such as the London Eye, the Washington Monument, and so on. It turned out that her name was Annabeth, and she was huge on architecture. I also ended up learning that she had ADHD as well, and after a while our conversation about monuments ended up as one about things we enjoyed doing over the summer. It eventually took us to where we were headed. She was going to a summer camp with her boyfriend, whose name was Percy, and his cousin Nico. I was also headed to a summer camp in New York, but I couldn't remember what it was called or where it was. I was supposed to be going back to Tokyo for a month then home, but the plans had been changed last year at the end of summer.

I had some blue Kool-Aid in my backpack and I was getting thirsty, but I didn't feel like freaking Annabeth out by possibly changing my eyes from the muddy blue-brown of river water to the crazy blue color of blue Kool-Aid. I wonder what flavor that blue stuff is supposed to be. Is it blue raspberry or blueberry or just blue? I never paid attention, and it was starting to bug me. I decided to give it a go; at least it wasn't the cherry kind. Turns out its blue raspberry. And compared to the now distant Ohio River, a much more likely eye color. Annabeth looked over at me a while later and asked me if I knew what time the dinner car would be serving breakfast.

"I have no idea," I said, "but I feel like stretching my legs so I may as well go and check it out."

I had turned towards her when I spoke, and she had seen my eyes. Turns out they were blue raspberry.

"Are your eyes blue or brown?" she asked me in a quizzical tone.

"They're blue, brown, green, and just about every other color you can imagine." I responded. It's not like that's a new question. I had heard it at least a million times.

She thought about this then asked me a strange, off topic (or at least in my opinion) question. "Are you dyslexic?" The answer to that one was yes, but I hesitated for a moment. Why did she care?

"Umm…. Yes. I think I'll go look and see what time the diner car opens. I'll be back in a bit." I said, then walked off, wondering about the weirdo questions. Oh well, I guess it didn't matter. It's not like she was planning identity theft or something…. I sighed. I'd been watching too many stupid commercials lately. I reached the car, which happened to be the last one, and it said that it opened at 7 am. I looked down at my wristwatch, which was all white but with a purple clock face. It was only 6:30. The trick was to get there five minutes early, even if it meant waiting. If you got there 20 minutes after it opened it would already be full and they would put you on their "waiting list", which took forever. I wandered back to my seat after walking up several cars to stretch my legs.

Annabeth still had on that calculating look, which I didn't like, and Percy and Nico looked uncomfortable, which I liked even less. What could she have done that made them like that? I sat down again and started to clean up the mess of stuff that had accumulated in my foot space. Just as I zipped the zebra stripe backpack back up, something happened.

_Crash!_

The entire train rocked about. I froze. What in the world was that? Percy and Nico jumped out of their seats and started towards the crash, which seemed to have happened near the end of the train. Annabeth started jamming the stuff back into their packs as more crashes sounded.

"What in the world are you doing?" I asked with disbelief as some sort of angry cheerleader came from the other direction. Annabeth pulled out a bronze knife. A bronze _knife_? Had I been talking to some sort of killer that targets cheerleaders? She ignored my question and stumbled out into the isle. That's when it got even stranger. The cheerleader started turning into some sort of freaky…. Thing that looked like a mismatched Halloween costume. I'd say it was somewhere between the human torch, a robot, and a donkey? That would be a really lame Halloween costume. Just imagine what names…. Okay getting off task.

The thing launched itself at Annabeth after shouting something that sounded like "Die, demigod!" What was a demigod? Sounded like something out of a video game, and this time I refuse to get off topic. Annabeth went at the thing with her knife, but somehow the beast ended up with a sword. Where did that come from? Then I saw a sheath at its belt which answered my question. They moved a bit farther up the isle, and all of the people were covering their heads and a couple were saying things about shooting. Did they think they had guns? I've never heard of someone shooting a knife. I decided that I may as well put my pack on and just to be nice, I picked the others' bags off of the floor where they were scattered about and put them on Annabeth's chair. I sat there as she defeated the beastie, and then it poofed into some green-yellow dust that went all over the place. I heard someone call out that it was blood, but it sure didn't look like it to me. Annabeth came back for their stuff, and she looked at me.

"You saw it, didn't you?" she asked me.

"I think that seeing and understanding aren't quite the same thing, though I did see _something_." was my answer.

"Well, I guess you're going to have to come with us," she told me then paused, thinking. "What was the name of the camp you're going to?"

"Erm… I think it had to do with a farm of some sort…" was my lame answer.

"Close enough," she decided, "Come with me."

I decided not to question her decision because even if she was a knife maniac that enjoyed killing everything, I'd like to have her with me when we go a few cars over to get her friends. Judging by the occasional crashes there was still more of the poorly dressed things.

"What exactly was that?" I asked her, not sure if I really wanted an answer.

"Do you know the Greek myths?" she asked me. That was way off topic again, or was it?

"Only a little. I had to learn some for my Latin class a couple years ago, but what I learned was mostly Roman" I replied. We were getting much closer to the noises, and while we were talking we were continuing to force our way down the train.

"Well, you most likely wouldn't understand what they are yet. Just wait till you get to camp."

We approached the last car, which was the origin of the noises. This was also the dining car. Percy was jumping around and slashing at a poorly dressed thing with his 3 foot long bronze sword, while the Nico kid was attacking two women with snake trunks for legs with some sort of black sword. The train started to slow, I guess the conductor or driver or whatever you call the person that steers the train got the message that there were some maniacs with knifes and things out of horror movies were fighting with each other in the back of the train. As the train slowed, one of the snake ladies noticed us and charged over. Since he no longer had to ward off two attackers, Nico quickly put an end to the other thing. Annabeth successfully threw her knife at the one coming at us as well, and they both vaporized like the first one. Just when the train stopped completely, Percy managed to get under the poorly dressed one's guard. Annabeth was giving them their bags back, and then they started discussing how they, or should I say we, were going to leave the train.

"Well I say we go downstairs and then just plow the door open," Percy said to Annabeth.

"I'd say that it may work better if we used a fire escape. We don't know how thick that door is," she told us all. Everyone else seemed to agree with that, even if I just kind of stood there. The others didn't seem to question the fact that I was tagging along, and soon we were down on the first floor. We all climbed over a row of empty seats, then followed Annabeth's lead and out of one of the fire escapes.

All I was wondering was where in the world we were headed.

**Sadly, now is the time for the disclaimer. And here to do it is a boring pixie from Fairly Odd Parents, which my brother was watching today for some reason! **

**Pixie: SomniumAstrum does not own PJO, Kool-Aid, Crystal Light, Huggies, Gatorade, any sort of vitamin water brand, Puma, Eat n' Park, Fairly Odd Parents, any monuments, or blah blah blah blah blah blah, you get the point. However, SomniumAstrum does own Ula and the plot.**

**I also own some Smiley Cookies, so review! And just in case you don't know what I mean by Huggies, I'm not talking about the diaper brand. I'm talking about little juice pouches that are shaped like barrels and taste a lot like Kool-Aid. **

**I love constructive criticism. It helps me, but it has to tell me exactly what is wrong and what I can do to fix it.  
**

**But anyways, free virtual Smiley Cookies for helpful reviews! **


	2. Knife Maniacs

**Chapter Two**

We managed to get away from the train tracks without anyone seeing us. I had seen some strange things in my life, but this was by far the strangest. Why were we running away from some poorly dressed villains? Or were we running from the law? I hoped not. I'm not really the type of person that goes around with crazy knife maniacs that were killing people.

After we got a good amount of space between ourselves and the train, we stopped. I had decided a while back that I wasn't going to speak unless they were going to explain to my why we had to get away from the train. The Percy guy looked at me.

"Sorry for not explaining first. We had to get some distance from ourselves and the mortals, they ask a lot of questions," he said in an apologetic tone.

"Hold on there. You're talking about 'mortals' as if you aren't one," I responded carefully. Maybe these people were crazed, confused, knife maniacs. This time Annabeth responded.

"We are only half mortal, and we think you may be the same," she said, then looked around the clearing we were in. The clearing wasn't anything special, but I wasn't doing quality control on the choice of clearing. I wanted some answers.

"Well then what the heck is the other half? Are we supposed to be some crazy hybrids from a sci-fi book?" I was sort of losing it. Scratch that, really losing it. Half human? Seriously? They could at least come up with a more original idea. Next thing you know they are going to be saying things about spacemen abducting them. I wouldn't be surprised.

"Not quite," she answered, "you know how I was talking about the Greek myths?"

"Yeah," I answered. The seemingly off topic question about Greek myths when I asked what the cheerleaders in the awful Halloween costumes were.

"Well," she said, "they're real." Was I really supposed to be believing this? I supposed that the myths I had heard of actually did fit in with a few of the strange occurrences that had happened in my life, but still. "I don't expect you to believe me," she continued on, "but you will eventually." I wasn't sure about that. Annabeth turned to address Percy and Nico. "Now how are we planning on getting to camp? If Blackjack is in the area, Percy, then you could tell him to come back with a few of his friends. Though I'm not totally sure what we would do in the meantime."

Percy just stood there staring at the ground for a moment. Annabeth and Nico didn't look surprised at this. What was he supposed to be doing? And who is Blackjack?

"He's on his way back to camp. Might be late afternoon by the time he's back, depending on how many Pegasi are needed for riding lessons by the campers," he said. Was he supposed to have telekinetic abilities or some crap like that? He didn't talk to anybody. And now they're talking about Pegasi. I really was with a bunch of psycho knife maniacs.

After that episode, Percy and Nico went to scout out the area. And Annabeth tried to explain the entire "mythology is real" thing to me. I hate to admit it, but it made sense. All of those odd events in my life that I completely ignored could have easily classified as Greek mythology, and in a way, I was glad I wasn't crazy. I take that back. I'm just glad that I'm not the _only one _who's crazy. Apparently, there is an entire camp full of people like this.

Percy and Nico eventually returned and told us that there was a gas station up a road, and the road actually wasn't too far away.

"Well, did you get anything?" Annabeth asked once Percy had told her about the station, "And were you able to figure out what state we're in?"

"Ummm…" was the only response, which came from Nico.

"Don't tell me that you went all the way to the gas station then just walked back," she said, obviously amazed that they were able to forget that much.

So we ended up going back to the gas station with the guys. We walked up and into the store. It seemed like they didn't have too many customers like us. Or they just thought we looked suspicious. Hey, I would think we looked suspicious too. This place was just a bit off the highway, and most of the customers would have been coming in cars. We didn't, and there weren't any cars in the parking lot if we wanted to lie about it anyway. It was about 7 am, and the cashier didn't look too awake. It was one of the people that work in the back making the made to order things that was giving us questioning glances. It seemed like we had better make this quick.

Annabeth got a map, and we all got some food. As far as drinks go, I picked bottled water out of habit. Then I realized that it didn't matter anyway, and got some purple Kool-Aid. I guessed that my eyes had been a pale brown from groundwater right before this, since there didn't seem to be any major water sources around.

I had guessed right. When I picked up the Kool-Aid after we paid, the clerk looked at me like I was some sort of alien. We left the gas station and the now completely awake cashier and traveled back into the woods.

"This is great," Percy said, breaking the silence, "but where are we?" Annabeth sighed and rolled her eyes.

"Well, the first clue would have been at the gas station. There was a sign in the window for the Pennsylvania lottery. Then if you weren't able to get that, Seaweed Brain, I did buy a map, and I therefore know that we are in North-Eastern Pennsylvania, not far from the New York border." Percy looked embarrassed and decided not to ask any more stupid questions that his girlfriend would consider the answers to obvious.

After a while, we made it back to the clearing. But it wasn't long before something ridiculously amazing happened. A Pegasus, a real life _Pegasus,_ came down for a landing in the clearing. And it was followed by three more. Okay, so if they hadn't convinced me of the Greek myths, they had now. How else could I be seeing _Pegasi_? I continued to stare blankly at the winged horses.

Percy interrupted my staring, "Let's go." Wait a second.

"Are we supposed to _fly_ on them?" I asked, nervous. I didn't feel comfortable at ten feet in the air, and I was going to go hundreds of feet up bareback on a stinking _flying horse_?

My only answer was an, "Uh, yeah."

I practically freaked out right then and there. The next advents were a blur, and I was pretty sure that I was hyperventilating. I think that Annabeth gave a lengthy explanation about how safe they were, and somehow I ended up on the back of the only black Pegasus. Before I knew it, we were flying.

I didn't scream, I had never screamed before **(A/N I have never screamed. I don't think it is possible for me for some reason unknown to me… When I try to, it comes out as a half-hearted "Ahhhhhh!")**. I was freaking out though. I squeezed my eyes shut so hard that it hurt.

This torture lasted for about a half hour, then I began to feel like the Pegasus was dropping. I knew it! We were going to crash! I'll tell you what, they don't kid about the whole live-flashing-before-your-eyes thing. It happened to me. For some reason, my mind singled out the memory of my pet turtle that was back home in Aussie. The turtle itself was a bit odd. He looked like a sea turtle, only he lived in a tank and was about the size of a normal pet turtle. I didn't remember getting him. But just then, I remembered something. That in itself was strange, seeing as my memory had never done that to me before.

I remembered staring at the turtle in the tank, watching him swim. There was a hallway behind the room the turtle was in, and the hallway was home to the side door of my Aunt's house. My Aunt, Uncle, and a man that I didn't know were standing near the doorway talking, but I wasn't paying attention to them. I only noticed because the light from the windows in the hall was reflecting off of my turtle's tank, and their image was in it. The man that I didn't recognize had shorter black hair, green eyes, and tan skin. He was about thirty and didn't look too happy. I wasn't happy either, seeing as my mum had just died. It was funny, I didn't know him, yet it seemed like a did. He left, and I was starting at my turtle again.

My eyes popped open on their own accord, and I saw that it didn't look too much like we were crashing, in fact, it looked like we were landing in a very specific place. We weren't too far away from the ground by now, so I had a perfect view of the place. There was a huge blue farmhouse, acres of fields, and some other things that were much less common. Among these were tons of crazy looking cabins, a giant rock wall that was spewing lava, a fighting arena, and much more. This was the crazy camp they had talked about for sure.

Hopefully there wouldn't be too many knife maniacs.

**Sorry if this chapter is sort of short. It's a bit of a filler, but it holds a memory that has a lot to do with who Ula is. The title of the Fic kind of gives it away, but she hasn't seen that, and doesn't know who her parent is. Oh, and if I spelled Pegasi wrong, tell me.**

**Disclaimer: I only own Ula, the plot, and her turtle. **

**Chapter three may take a while. I have yet to decide who is going to show her around camp, and how she will react to some… stuff.**

**If you have any brilliant ideas that you haven't seen used before, PM them to me. CC helps me and you need to comment! Comments make the chapters come much faster then they would otherwise. Oh, and my five year old twin cousins ate my smiley cookies while they were here :/ And I'm not kidding. They ate them all while I was with other family members….**

**Free virtual blue cookies for helpful reviewers with helpful reviews!**


	3. Camp Tour

**Chapter Three**

As soon as we landed on the ground, I jumped down and crashed onto the grass. I just laid there for a while on my back, and it probably looked a bit like I was making a snow angel, but without the snow. I was _never _going to do that again. Ever.

My moment of peace was interrupted by the others landing. Great. I didn't feel like doing anything except laying here until I was calm enough to think straight. I think they debated on what they should do about me, but again, I didn't care. Eventually they left, and Annabeth yelled over to me that they would be back in a while.

I just sat there and stared at the sky. There were little puffy clouds all over. I didn't really like them, they made it cold every time they went in front of the sun. However, Percy was back to get me all too soon.

"Come on, you need to come to the Big House," he said, and a vaguely wondered what the Big House was. But then I scolded myself for being stupid, since it was most likely the giant blue house that I saw from the air. I managed to push myself to my own feet, then looked at the Big House. Well, it was definitely big.

"Follow me," Percy said as soon as I was up. We walked over there, and made it in good time since it wasn't too far away. I didn't look around as we went, I figured that there would be enough time to see it later.

When we got up on the porch, I took a quick look around. One side of it had a porch swing, and the other had a table with a strange abandoned game on it. Little game pieces were scattered everywhere, like whoever left it was in a hurry. Percy and I then continued into the house. I didn't see Nico, but Annabeth was there talking to… oh my god… er, gods… There was a man that horse legs. I didn't want to be rude to the horse man, so I tried not to stare. But I couldn't keep myself completely from staring at his horse legs. It wasn't long until he noticed Percy and myself standing there, and in my case, staring at him.

"Hello there, demigod. I see that Percy, Annabeth, and Nico have found you before you had the chance to make it here on your own. You were, however, supposed to arrive today anyway, so it doesn't make much of a difference," He said. Hold on there, my Aunt was sending me to _this _camp? Now she was a crazy knife maniac too! Before I could have a total freak out and yell at him, he continued on to Annabeth and Percy, "Her Aunt and Uncle said that they weren't aware of who her parent was, so she will have to stay in the undetermined cabin for the time being, until she is claimed. The reason why she is thirteen and unclaimed was said to be the fact that she lives in Australia. For now, she needs to be shown around camp, so why-" He was cut off.

"Chiron!" a girl burst into the room, looking out of breath and flustered. She had black hair and blue eyes, and she was wearing some punk rock accessories that kind of went against some more princess-like things she was wearing as well.

"Thalia, what are you doing here?" Annabeth asked with surprise.

"Urgent message," she managed to get out between breaths. Chiron the horse man looked very concerned at that.

"How about I go and show Ula around while this gets sorted out," Percy said to Chiron. Before they had time to answer, he had left. I decided I'd rather take my chances with Percy than a group with a horse man in it, no offense to Chiron.

We went down to the cabins first, and we walked slowly as Percy did his best to explain things. I could tell that he was trying, but he wasn't that great at stuff like that.

"Percy!" Annabeth called from a good bit closer to the Big House, "You have to come hear this RIGHT NOW!" She then turned and dashed back. That didn't sound good. Percy glanced around frantically. There weren't many people around, just some smart looking kid trying to control a mess of papers across the inner circle of cabins and a couple of bored looking girls around my age sitting nearby.

"Genvieve! Susa!" Percy called to them. According to the explanation he gave me, he knew almost everybody here since he taught the sword fighting lessons most of the time. The bored looking girls looked up, surprised, then made their way over. One of them had red hair that curled as wildly as mine did and had odd purple-blue eyes. She was wearing a camp Half-Blood t-shirt and a pair of denim shorts. The other girl had long, straight blonde hair and light green eyes with hazel centers. She was wearing some clothes that she had obviously been gardening or something in, but they looked good on her. Percy continued on once they came over, "Hey, I need you to show Ula around. She's a new camper and I'm needed up at the Big House."

"No worries," the girl with the light green eyes said to Percy. She had a slight French accent. Percy nodded, then hurried back. The girl continued, "Well, I'm Genvieve, and this is Susa. We both came here shortly after the Titan War was over last summer."

"We weren't involved in the war though. My mother is Hecate, the goddess of magic," Susa said. She sort of sand her words, and when she was done she evaluated me like I might try something crazy. I however, had no real reaction. I didn't know there was a goddess of magic. In fact, I didn't even know that magic existed, but that would be really cool. Imagine what you could do with that…

"And my mother is Persephone, the goddess of springtime. We are both minor demigods, but we have nothing against the Olympians," Genvieve added.

Me, being horrible with names, wanted to double check. "Okay, so your name is Genevieve, and your mother is Persephone," I said to the blonde girl.

"No, actually it is Genvieve. Being a French name, it is pronounced SHAUN-VEE-EV instead of JEN-EE-VIVE," she corrected, but with a smile that said it was no big deal.

"And you," I said turning to the girl with purple-blue eyes, "are Susa?"

"Yes, I am. Now how about we get this tour under way?" she asked with a smirk that I didn't particularly trust.

We went all over the place, and it took an hour or two. I was glad that I was with them instead of Percy, they made the entire thing much more interesting by adding abstract comments and stuff like that. As I got to know the camp, I also got to know them better. Genvieve was actually born in France, though she moved to the States when she was eight. Her father was a botanist that worked on some project or another at a conservatory. She was a pretty cool person, and knew a ton of people at camp. She said hello to everybody and they said hi back.

Susa kept to herself a bit more than Genvieve, but she was really random and fun to be around. Apparently she didn't have dyslexia as bad as most other demigods, and could read fairly well. She was also a total grammar nut and enjoyed counting how many times Genvieve said "like" in a sentence. One time Genvieve actually said like four times in a single sentence, and when Susa pointed that out, they started laughing. Apparently, Susa had challenged a Aphrodite girl to say a paragraph to her about whatever she enjoyed, but without saying like. This was one of the smarter Aphrodite girls, but she had to pause every other word to think them through. These people were interesting.

Eventually dinner came around, and I was starving since I had missed lunch. It's not like I would have wanted to eat while riding on a Pegasus. That probably wouldn't have ended well. We went to the dining pavilion, which was pretty big. There were twelve groups of tables, one group per Olympian. You got to sit at the table that was closest to your parent's power. For example, Genvieve would be sitting at the Demeter table since they both had to do with gardening and growing stuff. I asked Susa where she would be, but she said that she usually just gets her food and takes it somewhere else since she didn't really get along with anybody at her table. There were several children of Persephone other than Genvieve, but Susa was alone in her cabin. I didn't really want to be alone in my cabin, but since I was the only unclaimed demigod, I would have to do so. And also, since I was unclaimed, I got to sit with any cabin that I was invited to sit with. I guess it made up for the lack of others in my cabin.

Dinner was really awesome, even if I wasn't claimed. I got to sit with Genvieve's friends and they were really nice. I got to have my own purple orange soda, which was really cool, since my favorite color was not only purple, but my eyes turned a fizzy purple to match. The food was great. I did put some extra into the fire while praying to be claimed, which turned out to be a failure. That was the huge downfall of dinner. Wasn't everyone over the age of 13 supposed to be claimed? I was over 13, and I definitely wasn't claimed. But I enjoyed dinner none the less.

oooo

The unclaimed cabin was on the outside of the outer circle of cabins. The place was plain white and looked like a normal, everyday cabin, unlike the others around it. The inside was fairly plain as well. I put on some pajamas that I borrowed from Genvieve, and climbed into bed.

This had been the oddest day of my life. Ever.

My total normal world had been flipped upside-down and shaken until it surrendered. But the day wasn't too bad, save the evil monsters on the train and the Pegasus flight.

I was also wondering what happened to the situation that caused Percy to go back to the Big House. I hadn't heard heads or tails of it, and was hoping that it was resolved. The day had been long, and I could feel myself falling asleep even though I didn't really want to sleep.

The last think I thought about before I clunked out was if I would ever get claimed.

**Cool chapter, eh? I think I have liked writing this one the most, even though it was hard to put something interesting into it. **

**Did you love it? Review to tell me what you loved. Hate it? Review to tell me why. Just thought it was okay? Yet again, review. Last I checked, my story had five reviews, which is pretty pathetic compared to the number of people who read it. So just review. I know everyone enjoys being lazy, but it isn't hard to press the review button, write something simple like "Good Job", then press submit. It's only 10 buttons to press, so please.**

**To all of you who are actually reading this, thanks. A ton of people skip author's notes and move on. But I really enjoy it when people read the author's notes. Virtual blue cookies for you, cheesecrazy8112 and dreamingmydaysaway, since you are the only two people who's reviews actually count. If you haven't read my profile, then you wouldn't know that MortuusAstrum is actually my cousin, and sorry Mortuus, but your reviews are mandatory ;) And aslo, she has decided to change her pen name to NoxAstrum or LuxAstrum, if you look at the reviews and don't see MortuusAstrum.**

**Genvieve and Susa are based on friends of mine. One of them would know it for sure if they bothered to read my story, but I'm not sure if my friend who I based Susa off of would recognize herself in the character. **

**Now what in the world caused that disturbance at the Big House? Oh jeez, I wonder- oh, wait. I already know since I'm the author ****J**

**Now to end this ridiculously long author's note, here is the disclaimer, told by a crazy dude who thinks he is a magician. Don't tell him, but he isn't.**

**Mistaken Magician: SomniumAstrum only owns Ula, the plot, and the characters of Genvieve and Susa! *throws a ball at the ground, and the ball explodes, causing a bit of smoke to go up. You can clearly see the Magician run off to who know where***

**Virtual purple orange soda for helpful reviewers with helpful reviews!**


	4. Try Outs

**Chapter Four**

The next three days flew by. I spent a lot of my time with Genvieve and Susa, and before long it was Wednesday. Just so you know, Wednesdays aren't usually that special to me. But this Wednesday was different since I was finally getting to try out some of the different activities at camp. I hadn't up to then since all of the staff and senior councilors had been so busy with something. Nobody knew about what they were doing, but I had a good idea why. I didn't tell anyone, though.

Susa and I were sitting around near the arena, doing absolutely nothing. We were alone, which wasn't strange since it was about 6 am. I didn't get up this early when I was home back in Aussie, but since I had a fourteen hour adjustment it was easy to reform my schedule so I got up earlier. It wasn't like we were allowed to stay up late anyways. But then again, who was going to catch me?

I was still in the unclaimed cabin by myself. Maybe my father had forgotten about me… On the plus side, I sort of did whatever I felt like doing, as long as it didn't involve any activities. Usually the senior camper for each cabin made the rules, but since they were so busy and I was the only one in my cabin I was left alone until it was brought to Chiron's attention that I wasn't doing a thing. So he decided I was to try out some of the activities, then pick a few out for my activities.

So back to the present. We were sitting there debating whether or not the camp's food should be healthier. Hey, we were bored. I think the conversation somehow got started by talking about WWII myths **(A/N The story that carrots make your eyesight better is actually a myth from WWII. Or maybe WWI, though I'm rather sure it's WWII. They needed an excuse to explain radar that would keep their enemies from being too suspicious, so they said it was from eating a lot of carrots. I think I saw that on Dr. Oz or something)**. Luckily, Percy showed up before I had a chance to talk about the chicken from one of the many schools' cafeteria that I was forced to eat in for a year. I will tell you what, most everybody called it "Grade F" since it was slightly green. And so was the pepperoni. Speaking of pepperoni- oh wait, I'm getting off topic again.

"Okay, Ula, I'm going to go last, but Annabeth made a list of places you're going to be going to try things out. I think you have archery first, though I'm not sure," he said, handing me the list. Glancing at it, I realized just how many activities there were at camp. This would take a while.

Percy was right, I did have archery first. I assume it was first because Apollo kids didn't mind getting up early near sunrise with their father being the sun god and all. Susa and I wandered down to the archery range, and she was telling me how much she disliked archery. Apparently, she was really good, but they said it was "unfair" for her to enchant her bow and arrows with magic so that they never missed. It kind of was, but I didn't tell her that.

We got there and met up with the guy named Landon who was teaching us. Each time he wanted to correct me on how I was holding something or whatever, Susa beat him to it. He kept scowling at her, and I guessed that he didn't appreciate that she knew as much about archery as he did. Before I had a chance to shoot anything, Genvieve came. She was wearing a pair of jeans, a blue shirt, and crocs. I really dislike crocs, and they bother my feet. Plus, they look like you have hunks of Styrofoam on your feet, but I guess she liked them because she spent a lot of her time gardening.

"Hi people!" she said happily, "Susa, you're going to have to try harder for me to believe that the enchanted pool noodle you left for me in my cabin is actually a water sled from Cloral." **(A/N This is from the Pendragon series, if you haven't read them. Water sleds are sort of like kick boards with motors on them so that they pull you through the water.) **Then she noticed Landon was there. "You're Landon, right?"

"Yep! And you are… wait… Genevieve, right?" he asked in return.

"Actually," she replied, "it is French and pronounced SHAUN-VEE-EV," looking upset about having to correct him. She looked back to me and said, "Find me when you're done trying out activities."

"See you around," Landon said to her as she was about to leave. She nodded, and I could swear that she was blushing. Note to self: tease her about that later.

We continued our lesson in archery, but Susa was the only one who actually did anything. Landon was too distracted. It didn't matter much anyway, since we soon found out that I stunk at archery. Badly. I tried to shoot an arrow, but it somehow bounced off of the ground and stuck itself into a tree. We left early due to some angry tree nymphs.

Susa escorted me to all of the different activities since I didn't know where half of them were. We went to Arts and Crafts, which I was pretty bad at until we got to stuff that had to do with colored paints and pencils- particularly watercolors. I couldn't read Ancient Greek since I had never tried it before, there was no way that I could ever figure out how to heal anything, and I had some difficulties with the lava on the climbing wall. For some reason I was good at canoeing. Most of the other stuff I was mediocre at.

It was a bit before lunch by the time I went to the arena to try out sword fighting with Percy, but that didn't matter since I wasn't really hungry. When Susa and I came in, he was teaching a more advanced, though not the best, class. Percy was dueling one on one with some guy about my age who had blonde hair and navy blue eyes that I didn't know. I could tell that Percy was going easy on him, which was scary. If he tried to fight me at half that level I thought I would be human, or at least half human, hamburger meat.

After a while, Percy decided the duel should be over and easily knocked the sword out of the guy's hands. Everyone else had been watching them, and they packed up and left soon afterwards. Percy looked over and saw me, then waved me over. I hoped I would be alive by the time this over.

"Okay, Ula, we're going to have to find a sword for you to practice with. There aren't many spares, so if there isn't one that balances for you, we will have to see if the Hephaestus cabin could make you one," he said when I was close enough to hear him. Susa was staying behind at near the entrance. Her excuse was that she didn't want to end up like the tree from when I tried archery.

We went through a small pile of swords, and Percy was right, none of them felt right. For now I would have to practice with a lopsided sword. Great. Percy started to show me all sorts of things like how to block blows on the edge of the sword and how you are supposed to get behind their defense. I wasn't sure if I would be any good at it, but I understood what he had said pretty well.

He started out going easy on me, but when I actually showed some skill at it, he pushed harder. Eventually, we were fighting faster than my ADHD reflexes were, which was saying something. He disarmed me, then looked at me in surprise.

"You said you had never used a sword before."

"I haven't," I replied, astounded more than he was, "I didn't even know I could do that."

"And that was with an unbalanced sword. I think if you get one that works for you then you could skip up to the class that you saw here earlier," he told me as I bent down to get the sword.

"I guess," I told him, still not believing what I had just done. This was the best that I had been at anything all day.

"Well, why don't you choose the other classes, and assuming you will choose sword fighting as well, I'll see you tomorrow," he said, then put a cap on his sword and it turned into a pen. I looked at the ballpoint pen in his hand and he just laughed, and after that packed up the stuff he had and left. I went back to where Susa had been watching.

"I guess I didn't have to stand back there after all," she told me, and smiled. She started to skip, and I hurried to keep up with her as we went to lunch.

During lunch most of the campers sat in the grass instead of at the tables since it was nice out. Susa and I sat with a son of Chione and a couple of daughters of Athena that were our age. The Athena girls were really smart and reminded me a TON of Annabeth. I also learned that Chione was the goddess of ice and snow. I had never heard of her, but it sounded like a cool parent to have. No pun intended. From across the lawn, I also spotted Genvieve sitting in a group that also included Landon. I laughed, accidentally out loud, which earned me some curious glances, but I ignored them.

Before we ate, we put food into the fire for the gods. I shoved a huge amount of food into the fire and looked up, but there still wasn't anything there. I sighed.

Was I ever going to be claimed?

**Okay! How'd you guys like it? Tell me in a review. Please. I beg of you!**

**So Ula is good at normal water-related things and… painting and drawing? What does that have to do with anything? Oh, you will find out soon enough. ;)**

**Discliamer: I only own Ula, Genvieve, Susa, and the plot.**

**Will Ula ever be claimed? Review and it will come sooner! Don't make Ula suffer in the unclaimed cabin by herself!**


	5. An Official Camper

**Chapter Five**

I was up early the next morning to go to my classes even though the classes didn't start for an hour or so. But eh, whatever. Most of the other campers were up by now as well, and there was a large crowd forming at the dining pavilion. Genvieve and I both had Arts and Crafts first thing in the morning so we were standing together. I could tell she was scanning the crowd for somebody, most likely Landon, but she didn't seem to find him.

"Attention, campers!" Mr. D called from the dining pavilion, near the fire that was kept lit constantly. I had found out about Dionysus being our camp director a couple days ago. I didn't really believe them until Mr. D decided to poof somewhere, and I'll tell you what, there isn't any way to surprise me anymore. "As you know, it is Friday. That means it is Capture the Flag tonight, blah blah blah. The teams will be leaded by Angel Clark of the Athena Cabin," he was interrupted here by someone boldly yelling out Annabeth Chase, but he ignored it, "and Cassandra Van Who from Ares." By Cassandra Van Who I think he meant Clarisse La Rue from Ares, who was a big, burly girl about Percy's age who enjoyed torturing other campers. I was hoping that the unclaimed cabin didn't fall under her rule. She was scary.

Mr. D then disappeared with a purple blast of light. I turned to Genvieve.

"Which side do you think I'm on?" I asked her.

"I'm not sure. I'm on the Athena cabin's side, which also includes Poseidon cabin, Apollo, Hecate, Chione, Demeter, Persephone, Hades, Nyx, Cybele, and a few others. I'm not totally sure who is on the Ares cabin's side, but it's pretty much everyone else. Oh, except for the Nike kids. They are referees since they are prone to influencing which side wins," she said distractedly.

"Okay… I guess I will have to ask Chiron about that," I told her as we went off to art class, thinking about how much better it would be if I was claimed.

oooo

All of the classes were before lunch. They didn't seem that long, but they were actually about 45 minutes or so. Except for sword fighting or archery, which were both an hour and a half. I headed to sword fighting by myself, since Susa liked archery but didn't take it and Genvieve was actually in archery.

I went there, and then found Percy. He had been talking to Annabeth about something, but she soon left, leaving Percy staring after her. I walked over to him, and waved me hand in front of his face.

"Earth to Percy!" I sang out. He snapped out of it, looking embarrassed. To cover it up, he changed the subject. I smiled, but went along with it.

"Er… I got the Hephaestus cabin to forge you a sword," he said, handing me a bracelet made out of goldstone. I had seen the gem before, and I even had a blue goldstone bracelet back at my house in Aussie. It was a gold colored stone that looked like it had glitter in it when it was in sunlight, and when my blue goldstone bracelet at home was in sunlight it looked like the night sky with thousands of little stars in it. **(A/N I actually do have one of those. It's so pretty…)** Percy continued on, "it responds to your voice, but it hasn't been named yet. It should become a sword if you tell it to." I wasn't too sure about that, but from what I had seen, the Hephaestus cabin was pretty amazing at stuff like this.

"Open," I told it hesitantly. I nearly dropped it when the ring of oval shaped beads changed into a hilt, from which a blade came out of. The hilt was goldstone, and the blade was celestial bronze. The goldstone was about the same color as the bronze, and it made the sword look fantastic. Not to mention the fact that it was perfectly balanced and felt like an extension of my arm. This would work.

"The Hephaestus campers have outdone themselves once again." he said, then yelled out that we were about to start to the other campers who had gathered in the arena. They all came to the end of the arena that Percy and I were at, and then he continued, "Today we are going to be dueling in pairs. Annabeth has made a list for you to pair off by skill level, so that way you are with your closest match in the class," he finished, and then started reading off the pairs.

I was paired with some guy named Zeke Chanter. It turns out that he was the person who was dueling Percy the day before, with blonde hair and navy blue eyes.

"I'm Zeke, if you didn't catch that."

"Nice to meet you," I said in return as I was trying to tie my shoe without putting my sword down, which ended up being an impossible task, so I just set the sword down.

"Cool accent. Are you from Australia?" he asked. I finished tying my shoe, and then looked to where I had set down my sword. I blinked a couple times then looked again. It wasn't there. But as soon as I realized this, I felt something on my wrist. I looked to find that my sword was already back on my wrist in bracelet form. Now that was awesome.

"Yeah, I am from Australia," I told him, "and I have been here for a week without being claimed."

"That's odd. Well, not the part about being from Australia. Most of the campers get claimed the first day they're here. My mother claimed me the first day, too."

"You're lucky. Who is your mum?" I asked. He didn't look like any of the other campers here.

"My mom is Cybele, the goddess of mountains." he told me. I had never heard of Cybele until this morning when Genvieve mentioned her. He then glanced around, and seeing how we were probably the only people standing around he said, "Well, we're getting off topic here. Let's go."

Zeke wasn't as good as Percy, but he was still really good. We were so evenly matched that it was one continuous fight, unlike others who had several. By the end of class, neither of us had an advantage in any way, for we even got tired at the same rate. Eventually, Percy called everyone to attention and said that we were excused to go to lunch.

I packed up, and then went to where Susa was waiting for me at the end of the arena.

"You're really good at that. I can't use a sword at all, well; at least I can't without using any enchantments on it. Oh, I also asked Chiron which team you were going to be on," she told me.

"Well, which one?" I asked after she paused to stare at the sky for a moment, examining an oddly shaped cloud.

"You can choose," she said, looking back at the path because she had almost tripped over a rock that she could have easily avoided. That was cool. There was no questioning which team I was going to be on. Susa added, "Assuming that you pick Athena's team, there's a meeting during lunch in their cabin." I smiled at her.

"Now how did you know which team I was going to pick?" I asked, and she smiled back.

oooo

I was standing with Susa fairly close to the border stream. Susa had her eyes closed, concentrating really hard. I heard the conch horn blow, and I saw the Ares team's defenders moving along their border. I was also on defense, but I didn't mind. The Athena cabin had a really good plan.

I moved along the border, watching the enemies' side of the stream. I hadn't moved far when I heard voices. And they weren't from the Ares team. I went further into the woods and saw Genvieve and Landon's blonde hair that reflected in the moonlight. They were whispering to each other but otherwise doing nothing.

"Excuse me," I told them. Genvieve looked embarrassed, but Landon smiled at me. I then continued, "But I believe that we have a game of capture the flag to win." After that I left since it was easy to tell that they would start watching the border again.

Percy and Seth, the son of Chione that I ate lunch with the other day, were waiting for Annabeth and Zeke to cross the stream. They were both invisible, Annabeth with her Yankees cap, and Zeke could bend some sort of odd air current around him so that the only sign that he existed was an area of cold mountain air where he was. I'm not sure how, but Percy and Seth somehow got the signal, and Percy made a wall out of the stream water. Seth didn't have the ability to move the water, but he could freeze it.

There was soon a long, frozen wall going the entire length of the area allotted for capture the flag. The cool part was the fact that it was completely clear, and gave us a good view of the other side. The tricky part would be knowing when to get rid of some of the wall to let Annabeth and Zeke through. We didn't need many defenders near the border anymore, so most of us went to possibly root out some of the Ares team that could have made it across the stream before the wall was created. I stayed put, and so did Seth. Percy left since he wasn't needed to unfreeze part of the wall.

A while later there was a commotion on the other side of the stream. It looked like a Hermes camper had figured out our trick alerted the others. Susa had created a mirage that looked like Percy to distract the campers who were guarding the flag so Annabeth and Zeke could hopefully get the flag unnoticed. I guessed that someone realized that the flag had gone missing while they were chasing the imaginary Percy. I could tell that Zeke had the flag, since I couldn't see any flag in the area where they were slashing at. While Annabeth's Yankees cap only made her invisible, Zeke could make other things invisible, such as the flag. There had been talk of him going on defense so that he could make our flag invisible to the Ares team, but in the end they decided that it would be better for him to be on offense. I looked to Seth.

"Should you unfreeze the wall?" I asked him.

"I'm not sure, that was what I was thinking about. If there is a gap that allows Zeke and Annabeth to get through, it could also let anybody that's on our side get to their side and win, so we would have to make sure that Zeke has a straight shot at getting the flag over here," he said, frowning. I saw his point.

Just then, I saw Zeke materialize out of the air. He had lost his invisibility when an Ares kid jabbed a spear into his foot. Ouch. Luckily, it didn't look too bad, and an Apollo camper should be able to fix it.

Annabeth wasn't as anywhere as close as Zeke, judging by where the Ares team was slashing at.

"Do you think that I should unfreeze part of the wall? Those two aren't going to last that long like that," Seth said. Just then Zeke dropped the flag, but nobody seemed to notice for some reason.

"Yeah, but is there any way for you to guard the gap in case somebody comes from behind us?" I asked.

"Yeah, but be ready to grab the flag as soon as I unfreeze the bit of the wall," he told me while unsheathing his sword. He took a quick glance to the woods behind us, then said, "Get close to the wall, the water may hit you, but every second will count if there is someone with our flag." I went up to the wall, waiting for him to unfreeze it.

As soon as the area in front of me went down, covering me in water, I took off. Unfortunately, so did a girl from the Ares team that had been hiding in the forest on our side. She had our flag. Luckily, Seth was there to guard, or we would have been toast.

I ran faster than I had in my memory, and got to where Zeke had dropped the flag in no time. I turned quickly and raced back, the sound of feet stomping against the ground in pursuit of me. I raced back to the gap in the wall, and jumped the creek. Percy and everyone else that had gone off to find people that had crossed to our side came into the clearing at this time.

I held the flag up, and absently wondered what the flag would change to. Usually, it changed to the parent of the camper that brought it across the stream. Would it change to undetermined for me? I got my answer.

A brilliant green light came from the where the flag was hoisted over my head. Well, it was near there. There were several gasps. Confused, I looked up to see something that was in my opinion amazing.

Over my head there was a large, glowing green trident. My father was Poseidon.

oooo

The Poseidon cabin was really cool. There was a fountain that created a rainbow and mother of pearl coated the insides of the walls.

"Well, this is the Poseidon cabin…" Percy told me awkwardly. I could tell that he wasn't used to doing this. As far as I was concerned, he was the only child of Poseidon that stayed here. In fact, it would be easy to tell with one look at the place.

"You're going to have to keep the mess on your side of the room," I told him. Then I smiled, so it wouldn't be too offensive. He smiled back, and began moving junk away from the bed that I chose. Percy reached under the bed, and to my surprise, pulled out the suitcase I had left on the train. He looked at it in confusion.

"That's my suitcase!" I said. I had no clue how it got there, but I was happy to see it. The only thing I had with me was my carry on case that I had managed to grab before we left the train, and I was sick of borrowing clothes from Genvieve. No offense to her. There was a note on top of the suitcase written in Ancient Greek. Percy read it, seeing as I couldn't read Ancient Greek.

"You seemed to be missing this. I hope it makes up for the delayed claiming. -P" he read.

"Who is P?" I asked.

"I think it's dad."

"Hold on. A Greek god, in fact, the Greek god that is my _father _went and got my suitcase for me?"

"I guess," was his only reply.

The cabins all had bathrooms. They didn't last summer, but one of the goddesses, I think it was Athena, decided to give her cabin their own bathroom. The gods and goddesses got all competitive and started to try and outdo each other, so the bathrooms were really, really awesome. The Poseidon cabin had a one of those crazy big showers that has like six faucets, and other bathroom things. And the soap smelled like the ocean. _That_ was cool.

Percy and I took turns getting ready, and I was happy to have my own pajamas back. Percy didn't really wear pajamas, just a t-shirt and shorts, which was kind of funny since his initials were PJ. We both got in bed after a while

"Lights out," he said. I was exhausted, so I didn't expect at all the dream that came to me.

_I was in a huge garden with tons of Greek buildings all around. There was a man walking down a path, and I realized that it was the same person that I saw in the reflection of my turtle's tank. He stopped and looked over the edge of a cliff, and I realized that he was looking at New York. That was odd._

"_You have claimed her," a woman said to him as she walked up. She had white hair, fair skin, and icy blue eyes. She looked a lot like Seth. There was another woman with her, who had red hair and multicolored eyes. The lady with multicolored eyes had a dress that changed colors. As I watched her, the dress went from blue to purple to red, and it continued on with the other colors of the rainbow._

"_I have," the man said, "she is my daughter." I had a feeling they were talking about me, and that the man was Poseidon._

"_Just remember," the woman in the rainbow dress told him, "you are not her only relative." What in the world was this lady talking about? Poseidon frowned at her, and narrowed his eyes. _

I woke up, and had to remind myself that what I had just witnessed was a dream. I looked at the clock. It was about 1 am, so I was going back to sleep. Nagging at the back of my mind was a memory of Susa saying something about demigod dreams.

**So how did you like it? Review and tell me!**

**I also need a name for Ula's sword. If you have any ideas, PM them to me. **

**This was a very, very long chapter and a lot happened. If you see any sort of mistake, don't refrain from mentioning them so that I can fix it! **

**Who are the two goddesses that were talking to Poseidon, and more importantly, what were they talking about? Mwahahaha ;D you're going to have to wait to find out!**

**Disclaimer: I don't own PJO!**

**I need more comments! They help me a **_**ton**_**, so comment! Just click the little Review button below this, type in "good job" and press submit. It wont kill you to press 10 buttons!**


	6. A Drachma Hunt Disaster

**Chapter Six**

"Where is all this old junk from anyway?" I asked as the three of us looked around the Attic of the Big House. We weren't really supposed to be up here since it was after curfew, but that wasn't relevant.

It had been a touch over a week since I first arrived at camp, and I was getting accustomed to things. Earlier today, Susa, Landon, Genvieve, Zeke, Seth, and myself had been having some random discussions while we ate lunch out on the grass. Someone, I believe it was Landon, mentioned something about a sibling of his borrowing a drachma and not paying him back. That snowballed into a conversation about how to get more drachmas. They're hard to get. Susa then mentioned how they stored drachmas that nobody owned in the Attic like it was no big deal.

Apparently, if a camper dies or goes missing their stuff gets sent back to their mortal parent if they have one. The missing/dead camper's drachmas are a different story. Somewhere along the line, the camp directors had decided that it was better to keep the drachmas here at camp instead of giving them to mortals. The more recent ones had been put into the camp's fund, but there were a ton just left behind in the Attic, lying forgotten by everyone. Everyone but Susa, that is.

Susa just spends time up there when she wants to be alone. Rachel, the new Oracle, has her own room on the first floor of the Big House, so the Attic is pretty much abandoned. Nobody else would ever want to go up there.

The conversation ended up on who would ever want to go up there at night to get the drachmas. It wasn't really serious, in fact, it was kind of like a bet. Susa volunteered immediately, since the place didn't creep her out and she knew her way around. I volunteered as well. I hadn't ever been in the Attic, but there wasn't much that could really spook me. Genvieve and Landon both have a lot of siblings, so they couldn't come without fear of being caught. Genvieve really wanted to come, and I wanted her to come along too, but she didn't want to run the risk of getting caught. Seth only had one sibling, a little sister, but she slept lightly and couldn't keep her mouth shut. So he couldn't come either. That left Zeke. He didn't really want to come since he was "tired" and his foot was hurt from Capture the Flag. Too bad for him. He was forced into coming by Landon and Seth, saying that they couldn't rely on girls to get the drachmas. Susa wasn't happy about that comment.

"It's stuff that doesn't really matter to anybody," Susa said to answer my question, "and it sort of reminds me of what I have heard about the River Styx. But instead of forgotten dreams, they're more like forgotten memories."

Zeke gave her a blank stare, and I laughed at him. We continued moving through the Attic until we got to a few rows of tables covered in even more forgotten memories.

"Most of the drachmas are in various containers on these tables," Susa told us. Zeke limped up to a container and opened it. He nearly dropped it, but managed to put the lid back on.

"That does _not _have drachmas in it," he said.

"Not all of them do," Susa said while walking over to a different jar. She opened the lid and grabbed a handful of the contents. She lifted her hand up and opened it, revealing golden drachmas. The drachmas were dropped back into the jar, the lid was screwed on, and the jar went into Susa's backpack.

Just then, the hatch of the Attic's entrance flew open. Rachel came in, but she wasn't just Rachel. She had glowing green eyes, and was slightly hunched over.

"Oh my gods," I heard Zeke mutter under his breath. Then Rachel spoke, and it sounded like three different voices layered on top of each other.

"_Three converge in the Attic,  
__The effect of a simple allusion,  
__To go on a mission that is diplomatic,  
__Yet may fail from the exclusion._

_Southwest must be the search,  
__To stop the one who plays a joker,  
__One will be lost to the birch,  
__All the cause of the invoker._

_Some will help from the dream world,  
__To get to the place of keystone,  
__But without the Queen of the Underworld,  
__Their fates will be set in bone._

_They find what they must ration,  
__But wouldn't if it weren't for the flower,  
__A quest against the others' passion,  
__Yet may fail even with willpower."_

By the end of her little poem, I was staring at her in shock. What in Hades was all that crap about?

"It looks like we have a prophecy," Susa said, seemingly unperturbed. Oh. I had heard of prophecies before, but I had never expected that I would get one so soon. I looked at a calculating Susa, then at a Zeke who just looked like his brain had shut off. This mission into the attic hadn't gone by plan at all. Rachel stumbled, then after a minute or so seemed to realize where she was.

"I just announced another prophecy, didn't I?" she asked. We all nodded in unison. Then she continued, "Well, I guess we should go to Chiron and tell him. Don't worry, I won't tell him about you guys being up here." She turned and left, so we followed.

oooo

"You should pack up today, then leave tomorrow morning. We will arrange a ride into New York City, but you will have to go from there."

"Okay, Chiron," Susa said. We had gone down to Chiron and told him about the prophecy. He acted like he had been expecting it.

"Should we tell them about what happened on the summer solstice?" Annabeth asked Chiron. He nodded, and told her to explain.

"On the summer solstice, which was the day that Ula came, the gods and goddesses had a meeting up on Olympus. Usually, we send campers and have them report back with what happened. But this year, we were so busy with all of the campers and everything that we decided it wasn't worth it. Turns out it would have been. The Olympians had a disagreement about something- a major disagreement. It was only between the Big Three and a few other gods, so not many knew what it was about. Artemis didn't know anything about the argument, but she still saw how dangerous it could be if this got out of hand and caused WWIII. She sent Thalia, but couldn't give us more information. The gods and goddesses are starting to take sides of the big three, so we were expecting a quest to help solve it. This should be the quest, but we aren't sure."

That's just great. Not only do I have to go on a quest from a prophecy that sounded incredibly gloomy and foreboding, it may be the only way to stop WWIII.

"You three will need to get some sleep tonight, whether or not you want to. You can ask questions in the morning," Chiron said, then waved us out of the Big House. Susa and I walked back to our cabins together.

"What do you think about all of this quest junk?" I asked her.

"I think it's a lost cause," she said, before parting with me on that happy note and skipping all the way back to her cabin. Susa was odd, but she always had a good idea of what was going on. I decided that I was too tired to think about this crap, and headed back to my cabin.

I snuck in so that Percy wouldn't hear me, though I was pretty sure he wouldn't since he sleeps like a log, and collapsed on my bed. The last think I thought about before I fell asleep was my turtle, which was so incredibly normal I almost laughed. What was I getting myself into?

**Yay! I have finally bothered to make a prophecy, so I now know what I'm doing for the rest of Gem of the Sea!**

**Disclaimer: I don't own PJO!**

**I'm still looking for a name for Ula's sword, and I also want opinions on the prophecy!**

**Free virtual kitty cats for helpful reviews! Yay kitty cats! If you like kitty cats too, look up kitty cat on YouTube. Click the one with the picture of a cat with the black background, it has a hilarious song!**

**Review!**

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	7. The Mumbler's History

**Chapter Seven**

I threw a change of clothes into my zebra stripe backpack, then managed to zip it up. I wasn't going to bring much since I had no clue if I would have to carry it for a long period of time. All it had in it was the change of clothes, some mortal money, a few drachmas, and my iPod. Oh, and a really cool solar powered iPod charger that belonged to myself and Susa. She used a couple drachmas from the Attic to pay a Hephaestus camper to make it. My iPod was purple and had really awesome marshmallow earbuds. Okay, getting off topic again.

It was only a bit after noon, and I could have slept in later. Eh, that wasn't happening now. I left the half dirty Poseidon cabin and went down to the archery range to meet Susa, as well as see Genvieve and Landon for the last time in a while. When I got there, I didn't see Susa right away. But I did see Genvieve and Landon. They were trying to convince a new camper from the Hemera cabin that bows weren't dangerous as long as they weren't pointed at you. **(A/N Hemera is the goddess of daylight, in case you didn't know that.) **Once they got her to try it, she was actually pretty good. I looked at the other side of the archery range and spotted Susa, so I started to walk over there.

I had never seen her use any sort of weapon before, and she was good. I couldn't tell if it was some sort of spell that she put on the bow or not, but if you didn't know that it would have been really impressive. Her bow was white with little purple-blue stripes on it. As I got closer, I noticed two things. First of all, the stripes on her bow were both glowing and rearranging themselves. That was weird. And second, she didn't have any arrow in the bow when she took aim. In fact it didn't look like she even had any arrows with her. Just then, she pulled the string back even more, and an arrow appeared out of nothingness. The arrow was made of a glowing crystal the same color purple of the stripes, and went flying across the range to get a bull's-eye on a distant target. When the arrow sank into it's target, it stopped glowing and part of the shaft dissolved into a powdery dust.

"It's not like I need any practice, but I thought I would come here and make sure my bow was in order." Susa said. She must have been aware that I was here for the last several minutes.

"Mmkay," I mumbled through a mouthful of PopRocks that I had found in my suitcase. They tickled the inside of my mouth. Too bad my eyes didn't change color with them, or they would be neon green right now.

"It's not usually considered polite to talk with your mouth full," Susa said with a teasing smirk. I just shrugged. "Why don't you go over to the arena and practice with your sword? We do have all day."

"Sure," I mumbled again.

"Mumbler!" She exclaimed, quoting Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I laughed and headed off towards the arena.

oooo

When I was got there, I noted that the arena was practically deserted. Sierra, Seth's younger sister, was there with one of her friends practicing. Nico was stabbing some training dummies in a corner. I was used to seeing at least twenty people here at a time, and it felt so…empty.

"It's odd to see this place so empty," a voice said behind me.

"That's exactly what I was thinking about," I told Zeke, who had come up behind me. He was still really quiet even though he was limping. He shrugged. After a few minutes, my ADHD took over and I had to _something_.

"So," I asked Zeke, "how did you find out about being a, well, demigod?"

"It's a long story, but I suppose I could tell you part of it. I grew up at Lake Tahoe, on the California side. Lake Tahoe is a huge glacial lake that is on the border of Nevada and California. In fact, if you look at a map and see the point where Nevada's west side bends inward at a slant, the place where the state line starts to go on a diagonal is right in the middle of the lake. The place is surrounded by mountains, and it's how my dad met my mom. My dad's an artist, and he makes paintings of the Lake and the surrounding area. He met my mom when he was painting up there. **(A/N Just in case you don't remember, Zeke's mom is Cybele. She's the goddess of mountains.) **I lived a pretty normal life up until a few years ago. Things started getting really wacky and all sorts of monsters starting coming after me. It just wasn't safe for me to be up there. So last fall I was sent here. I've been here ever since, except for the time where it's usually winter break if you're in school. I got to go home and hang around with my dad, his family, and my friends. Well anyway, when I was told that I was a demigod, I believed them. I wouldn't if it had been just a year before, but as I said, things were headed south. I've seen my mom a few times, and I don't really hold it against her that she can't really be my mom. I mean, she's a goddess and has other things to be doing." he said, then added, "What about you?"

"Oh," I said, "I've lived most of my life in Australia. I've been a foreign exchange student in a lot of places, too. I was born in the States, but when I was three my mum died. I've been living with my Aunt and Uncle ever since, but I don't mind it too much since I can't really remember my mom that well. When I was a little younger, I asked my Aunt what she looked like. My Aunt looked upset about me asking, but said she looked a lot like herself. That means she had platinum blonde hair and sort of multicolored eyes. **(A/N This may seem irrelevant, but just remember it anyway.) **But her eyes didn't change colors around water. I think that has to do with my father being Poseidon."

"Your eyes are different," Zeke said.

"Ummm… thanks?" I said. I hoped that wasn't an insult. Judging on how he looked surprised and embarrassed that he said that, it wasn't an insult at all.

"Aren't you supposed to being practicing or something?" Susa said. Thank you Susa! Friends are great for saving you from awkward situations.

"Eh, I don't really feel like practicing right now. I think I'm going to go back to my cabin to make sure everything is packed. It seems like I always forget something."

"Okay. I'll go with you since I have nothing better to do around here," she said. I turned and started walking, Susa following.

"In a bit of a tum-tigger?" she asked, borrowing a phrase from the Pendragon series.

"You could say that," I said, laughing.

"Just wait until I start quoting a dictionary of clichés that I have," she said mischievously. I groaned. "Don't care a rap for that, I see," she said, and I rolled my eyes. Susa would be the only person in the world who would actually read and quote a dictionary of clichés.

"Please, no further torture," I said. I tend to dislike most clichés. They can be hard to understand, especially if they are old. She smiled again, and by now we were right outside of the Poseidon cabin. We went in, and I stopped smiling when I saw something odd. I had left my zebra stripe backpack on an unused bunk bed near the fountain. The fountain had mist coming off of it, and it formed a large rainbow that was great for Iris Messages. The end of the rainbow didn't exactly meet the side of the fountain where the water was collected since there was a slight sea breeze that drifted through the cabin and blew the mist a little. The rainbow's end therefore drifted over the bunk where I had left my backpack.

The odd part was the fact that there was some clothes that I had never seen before on the edge of the bed near my backpack, which was an area that the rainbow covered. I walked over to the clothes and examined them. It was actually some sort of fancy UnderArmor shirt and a pair of skinny jeans. The shirt was white, and when it moved little specks of different colors glittered on it. The jeans were grey with metallic silver threads running through them. I also saw a note nearby. The note read: "_I noticed that you didn't have any armor, and judging by what the Oracle has said, you will need some. These clothes are enchanted to be exactly like clothes until they get hit by a weapon. The weapon will be reflected off of the clothing, and will keep you from harm. Try hard to succeed on the prophecy, for much depends on it. -Another Relative."_

"That's cool," Susa said, having read the note over my shoulder. It was written in Ancient Greek, I now noticed. "I'd advise that you wear it, since this is most likely from a god or goddess."

"Why would they give this to me?" I asked, somewhat shaken. But I wasn't shaken over the gift. As Susa said, the gift was really cool. I was worried about who gave it to me. Another Relative? It reminded me of the dream I had after Capture the Flag. Could this be from one of those two goddesses that was talking to Poseidon? But that was ridiculous, after all, it was just a dream.

"They could have a lot of reasons. They may want us to succeed on the quest, or they are trying to get on the good side of your father. Maybe they're actually concerned for your safety, even though it's a touch unlikely." Susa said.

"I guess." was all I could come up with.

oooo

I pulled a Brackenridge **(A/N That's a little ski town a few hours away from Denver) **t-shirt over the UnderArmor shirt that I decided to wear, along with the jeans. It was 5:45, and we were due to leave at 6. I grabbed my backpack and headed out of the Poseidon cabin, Percy still in there sleeping. I went to the Big House, and went inside of the main room. Susa was there waiting. Annabeth and Argus were there, too. I didn't see Chiron or Mr. D around.

"Argus is going to drive you into New York City, but he can't take you any farther. We can't risk having the van out for too long, since the other two of them are out in different parts of the US," Annabeth said.

"Okay," I said, and Susa nodded. Just as we were about to go to the van, Zeke came in.

"Sorry about that," he panted, "I couldn't find something."

"Let's just go," Susa said impatiently. We walked out to the van and got in. Argus started up the car and started to drive us away from camp. I looked out of the back windshield, and watched the camp vanish as we went around a tree-lined curve in the road.

Our quest had begun.

**The quest has started! **

**Thanks a ton to my friend SpiritusAstrum for both commenting and coming up with some of the conversation between Ula and Zeke in the arena. I'm horrible at stuff like that. **

**I still need a name for Ula's sword! I would like it if it referred to the gold color. Also, what do you think of the mysterious armor that someone gave Ula? I need you people to review!**

**Disclaimer: I don't own PJO, PopRocks, iPod, or UnderArmor!**

**Review!**

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	8. Magic Sports Equipment and Rainbows

**Chapter Eight**

Both Susa and I jammed our earbuds from our iPods into our ears for the trip to New York City. Zeke just sat there, looking bored. Maybe he was delayed because he couldn't find his iPod. A while later, I realized that one of my shoes had become untied, and bent over to tie it. My iPod fell off of my lap, and the jolt put it on shuffle. I hated it when that happened. Since when does shaking your iPod mean you want to song to change? **(A/N I find this feature of my new iPod rather annoying and unnecessary. But I'm too lazy to try to figure out how to turn it off :P )** The stupid thing jumped to a song that I didn't even like or listen to, and I reminded myself to take it off. When I got home. _If _I got home. Now that was a depressing thought.

I shut my iPod off instead of bothering to find the song I wanted again since we were within the city now. I tapped Susa on the shoulder, and when she turned around I pointed out the window. She had been listening to Don't Stop Believing with the volume up really loud. If I could remember correctly, that was her favorite song. Once the song was over, she too packed her iPod back up. Argus came to a halt near Central Park, and we prepared to leave the car. Zeke looked like he was almost asleep by now. Susa noticed too, so she went over and clapped her hands right in front of his face.

"Wha?" he said, nearly falling off of the seat.

"We're there," she said simply, then jumped out of the car. I was right behind her. I looked around, and suddenly realized that we had no clue where we should be headed. I was snapped out of my sudden realization when Zeke came out of the van and nearly tripped over something on the ground. He looked confused when he saw what had tripped him, and when I saw it, I was confused too.

Sitting there was some sort football, or as you call it in the States, a soccer ball. But it wasn't for long. It was soon a baseball, then a volleyball, and it kept switching. That wasn't natural.

"Hey, could you toss us our ball back?" a woman called from the park. She had brown hair, light green eyes, and she looked like an athlete. With her were two other people, a guy with dirty blonde hair and blue eyes, and a woman with golden hair and brown-gold eyes. They all looked to be in their 20s or so. Susa picked it up, then threw it back to the one who had called out to us. Turning around, the woman with the sports… item waved to her friends dismissively. The woman with the brown-gold eyes nodded, and the guy smiled. They started to walk away, the guy starting to tell some story judging by how he was waving his arms around to make a point. Once they were a decent distance away, the woman started to talk to us.

"I hope you do a good job on your quest, you have no clue what could happen if you fail," she said solemnly.

"Hold on," I said, "how do you know about the quest?"

"What? Did my item of power here not give me away?" she laughed, and her football/ baseball/ volleyball turned into a gold staff. The staff had laurels engraved on the top, and the other end was sharp like a spear. Okay, so that would make more sense. The woman was a goddess. She then continued, "Can you tell who I am?"

Both Zeke and I came up blank, but Susa had an answer.

"You're Nike, right?" she asked.

"You bet I am!" she said, smiling. I mentally smacked myself, that should have been obvious. "And I just wanted to wish you well on your quest. Who knows what would happen if it fails? Oh! And I have something for you!" she exclaimed, then dug her hand into her pocket. She pulled out a stack of baseball cards, then cheerily deemed this a mission accomplished, saying, "Trust me, no matter how much they get on your nerves, they are great to bribe collectors with! Hope you do a good job so that we don't have WWIII!" On that happy note, she disappeared into a flash of light and a cloud of laurel leaves that fell to the ground then sat there abandoned.

"I hate baseball cards," Susa said with a grimace.

"I know. I don't understand why people even collect them," I agreed.

"But judging on what Nike said, these are worth something. I suppose we should hang onto them," Susa decided, then put them into the jar with the drachmas that we found in the attic.

"So where are we going?" Zeke asked. Susa and I looked at each other, then shrugged.

"Well, what does the prophecy say? We already have completed the first two or three lines. Isn't there a line about going southwest? And parts about a place of keystone, the dream world, and the Underworld?" Susa said, and I nodded. She then continued on, "Well, we should definitely travel southwest. That's simple. What do you two think?"

"Well," I said, thinking, "I think I heard something about an entrance to the Underworld in Los Angeles. Maybe we should head that way. Not sure about the keystone part or the dream world part either."

"The dream world is Morpheus and his two brothers' realm. **(A/N Morpheus is a triplet, in case you didn't know that) **There are rumors of it being near or in the Underworld, too," Zeke added.

"Then I'm going to vote that we head to Los Angeles and take a visit to the Underworld," Susa declared.

"That sounds reasonable," I said.

"I have no clue," Zeke said, "so count me in."

"Okay, that settles it. The only question is how we are going to get from here to there as fast as we possibly can. There's no exact deadline for the completion of our quest, but it can't be good to take forever," Susa said. How _were_ we going to get there?

"Maybe we should decide after we eat breakfast," I suggested.

"Sounds like a good idea to me," Zeke said. Susa shrugged. So we set off in search of a place to eat. You know, there's a ton of restaurants in New York City and we somehow found a way to disagree with each other on nearly all of them. We ended up getting some stuff from a Whole Foods and eating it in the park. I had some peach yogurt, which was really good.

The weather outside was partially cloudy, but the clouds weren't in front of the sun. Or Apollo. Or his chariot. Oh, whatever. I wonder if the chariot has an autopilot feature. Don't you think that it would be annoying to have to go drive a chariot across the sky for hours on end? And what happens if he has to use the bathroom? Do gods and goddesses even go to the bathroom? Okay, not only was that off topic, but I was also creeping myself out.

As I was saying, the weather outside was cloudy, yet the sun was still out. By the time we had finished our breakfasts, it had started to drizzle. I wasn't getting wet because I'm a daughter of Poseidon and all, but the others were. Susa actually didn't seem to notice the rain at all, but Zeke looked peeved. I heard an odd hum, and looked up. Apparently, Zeke and Susa heard it as well since they looked up too. Just then, a really bright flash of light came. But it wasn't sunlight, for it was more colorful. _A rainbow, _I thought.

Splinters of color that reminded me of a broken stained glass window or a kaleidoscope swirled around in a dizzying pattern, then began to fade away. I looked around, and I was pretty sure that we weren't in New York anymore. In fact, I was definite about it.

"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore," Susa said, then pointed to a highway access sign next to a road that we were close to. "In fact, I think we're in Arizona." She finished, then started to hum that over the rainbow song that's in the Wizard of Oz. I squinted at the sign, then after a while I realized that it said that the turnoff nearby went to highway. Out of Phoenix.

How the heck did we get out of New York City on a rainbow?

**Okay, I finally got the chapter finished! Sorry for the HUGEMONGOUS delay! I've really busy, plus I wasn't sure how to start the quest off. Swim team season is back in, which is great, but I won't be able to update as often. If there's any mistakes in any of my chapters, tell me because I never proof read them when I'm done. PM me if you have any ideas, and REVIEW!**

**This disclaimer is brought to you by this nervous guy who has to read the disclaimer off of a piece of paper.**

**Nervous Ned: Erm…. Eggs, milk, flour, bread…oh! T-this is m-my shopping list. *flips the paper over* SomniumAstrumm owns a-anything that you can't find in real l-life or in one of Rick Riordan's b-books.**

**Me: … … ...**

**Review! Or else!**


	9. Not a Coyote

**Chapter Nine**

We all stood there for a few minutes, dumbfounded. One minute we had been sitting on a bench in Central Park, then the very next we were near Phoenix, Arizona. We had just traveled across most of the USA in a matter of seconds, and we didn't even know how.

"It doesn't usually rain here," Susa pointed out abstractly. But she was right. The soil looked like it was mostly sand, and there was practically no trees or large bushes. Looking up, I saw that it was raining out, yet the sun was still shining. Perfect conditions for a rainbow. The highway entrance out of Phoenix that we were near said it was two miles until the highway which meant that we couldn't be far from Phoenix in the other direction, and there weren't many cars around. That was a lucky break for us since we would probably be seen because the area was completely open.

"Do you think we should head towards civilization?" I asked. There was no way that we were walking between here and Los Angeles, so we would probably have to get some sort of transportation from the city.

"Yes," Susa said, "because we don't have any water or food packed with us and we would need it in this environment." We left Zeke out of the conversation since we were sure he would agree anyway. He looked kind of upset about it, but kept to himself.

I didn't like the desert. It's just so dry… and waterless. I have always disliked dry places like this, and now I know why. It just wasn't right for a child of Poseidon to be hanging around in a waterless place. Water is just so much better. I began to fantasize about being at the beach near my Aunt's house while we walked. The ocean there was a pretty blue-green color, and I always hung out with some of my friends from school or some neighbors.

"Look," Zeke said, snapping me out of my fantasy. He was pointing towards the horizon. In the distance, you could see the outskirts of Phoenix.

"Thank you for pointing out what we could already see," Susa remarked sarcastically. She had been drawing on her right arm with a purple sharpie marker while she walked. There was now a little purple mural of a forest all over her arm. It was really good, especially since she had been moving the entire time. You could see little birds flying up out of the woods and different bushes on the ground clearly even though it was all one color. The sky had begun to clear up a while ago, and it was getting hotter. It was great to be swimming when it was hot out or even sitting around back at camp, but when it's hot and dry, it's not any fun to be walking several miles.

"I pointed it out because it didn't look like either of you were paying any attention," Zeke said in defense. I knew that I hadn't been paying attention, but I felt like siding with Susa. And besides, Susa almost always won arguments.

"Then _you _weren't paying any attention. You would've seen how Ula was pretty much staring straight ahead and how I was glancing up every couple minutes," she retorted, still not bothering to look at him while talking. She was drawing the bark on one of the trees. Phoenix was getting closer, and I wondered how long this argument would last. They were both pretty stubborn.

I heard a howl in the distance. That was odd.

"Do coyotes come out during the day?" Zeke asked, changing the topic. Susa sighed.

"Coyotes are mostly nocturnal, but they can be seen during the day," she said. I heard another howl, coming closer. It really didn't sound like any coyote I had ever heard. Well, I had never actually heard a coyote in real life, but it didn't sound like any of the recordings that I had heard. Susa frowned, then capped her sharpie and put it away.

"That doesn't really sound like a coyote," I said, speaking for the first time.

"No, it doesn't," Susa agreed. There was a small, but rather deep, ravine running parallel to the road a good bit away from us. And it seemed like the howling was coming from the ravine. It kind of echoed against the walls, and it seemed strange. Again we heard a howl, but it was even closer this time. Like it was coming up out of ravine.

"That is _not _a coyote," Zeke said.

"Probably not," Susa said, not sounding particularly worried by this. "I wonder what it is."

We got our answer soon enough. It wasn't a coyote at all. It was five HUGE hellhounds that were each about the size of a double-decker bus. I briefly wondered what all those hellhounds had been doing in the ravine. Do hellhounds just hang out in ravines or something? That was a good question… what do hellhounds do in their free time?

Okay, that's off topic. The hellhounds had us surrounded in a matter of moments. I took off my bracelet and expanded it into a sword, Susa's bow appeared out of nowhere, and Zeke yanked a white rabbit foot keychain off of his backpack which became his sword. I had been wondering why he had been carrying that around. He hadn't seemed like the kind of person that would have horseshoes and four leaf clover charms lying around.

One of the hellhounds growled at us, then they attacked. It was nearly two on one, which was rather unfair. But hey, since when was the world fair? Two of them came charging at me. I dove under the first hellhound's legs and stabbed at one of it's hind legs. The only issue was the fact that the wound wasn't big enough to make it dissolve. Most of the time monsters went after a sword cut or two, but these thing were so big that a stab wound from a sword was like a paper cut. I ducked back out from under the hellhound before it could trample me, then spun and slashed at the other one. I got a good cut across hellhound number two's muzzle, but it only made it angry. Why couldn't these dumb monsters just die already?

A quick glance around told me that Susa and Zeke were having the same issue. Susa had got several shots into the hellhound that was attacking her, but eventually it came too close for her to use her bow. She was now slashing at it with a small celestial bronze knife that had yew branches and leaves carved into the hilt. **(A/N Yew trees are sacred to Hecate) **She wasn't half as good with her knife as she was with her bow, but she was holding her own. Zeke was attacking two hellhounds just as I was. The glance around nearly cost me. HH#1 (hellhound number one) was coming at me quickly, even though it was limping from where I stabbed it. Yet I noticed in time, so it couldn't just kill me. There was no way to attack its face without it voluntarily leaning over, so there was no way for me to try to get at it's face. Well, there wasn't any way when I was on the ground. It was risky, but I had an idea. I slashed a little at both of the hellhounds' legs, just enough so that they were slightly distracted. I then focused, and tried to summon as much water as I could. This was difficult, seeing as there wasn't much water in the desert air. When I control water, it doesn't usually hurt or bother me at all. It feels sort of like there's a gum band in my stomach or something. I can feel it pull, like a loose gum band being tugged on, but it didn't strain at all. Moving water around in the desert wasn't bad for me, but it wasn't too comfortable, either. It felt like a mixture of itching and tickling.

Soon, I was standing in my own little pillar of dusty water as high as the hellhounds' faces. As an abstract thought, I thought about how my eyes would be the color of the dusty water. Not letting the water go away completely, I jumped off of it. Willing the water to stay there, I jumped onto HH#2's muzzle. It was already cut up, but it was about to get even worse. For the hellhound, that is. I stabbed at it's eye before it could make any attempt to throw me off. My hunch was right- they would dissolve if you destroyed a vital organ. As the hellhound poofed into sandy dust that nearly matched my eye color, I moved my water tower so that it would catch me. I looked around for HH#1. Susa was still defending herself against her hellhound, though it looked as if she was winning. Zeke had somehow vaporized on of the hellhounds that had attacked him originally, and was getting rid of the other one. One small problem. Zeke had his back to my direction, and HH#1 was coming up behind him from my direction. During the duration of the fight, we had separated and put some distance between ourselves. There was no way to get to the hellhound or Zeke in time, and it was too noisy from the hellhounds growling and barking to yell to him. If I didn't do something, that hellhound was going to kill him.

I'm not sure what I did, but it seemed to work. I was vaguely aware that I raised my hand and thinking that the dumb animals were going to pay. The dusty water behind me rushed forward and surrounded the three hellhounds, and within a matter of seconds, something happened. Or I should say _I caused _something to happen.

The water hit the hellhounds and froze the huge dogs completely. I felt a tug in my stomach, on one of those gum bands. Only this gum band was shorter, and it hurt like crazy when it was flexed. The hellhounds glistened in a rainbow, glittering case of ice, and the world went black around me as I collapsed.

**Dun dun duuuuuuuun!**

**Okay, so the explanation of these happenings will take place in the next chapter, if you are totally confused by what just happened. I'm in a bit of a slump for this story right now, but I managed to get the last part of it written today by not letting myself read any other fanfics before I posted. And I would have had it up an hour or so ago, but then we had this massive thunderstorm and my mom made me turn off the computer till a half hour ago. Oh! A gum band is the same thing as a rubber band for those of you who don't know that. **

**If you notice any mistakes or have any ideas, PM me. And as always, REVIEW!**

**Disclaimer: I don't own PJO or anything you recognize from your life. I do however own some gum bands, so review or I will have my little brother fling them at you!  
**


	10. Finding Nemo and Chicken Salad

**Chapter Ten**

When I woke up, I wished I could just go back to sleep. I was exhausted, and I couldn't remember why. As far as I was concerned, it was the middle of summer and I didn't have to get up if I didn't want to.

Then it came back to me. I wasn't at my Aunt's house in Aussie, I was on some maniac quest to stop World War III from happening with Susa and Zeke. Bummer. I could really have used a good day of sleeping in. Just before I passed out, I remembered what had happened, but I wasn't sure if I could trust my memory. I remembered freezing a huge hellhound with some sort of crazy ice. As far as I was concerned, I couldn't do that. Freezing stuff would be what children of Chione, like Seth. And I wasn't Seth or his little sister, so it shouldn't be possible. Maybe I was mistaken and Susa and Zeke would tell me what really happened. Like if I ate some poisonous mushrooms or something.

When I opened my eyes, I couldn't see much because most of my hair was strung out over my face. I could see a little, though. It looked like we were in a motel room. Susa was sitting on a bed watching something on the TV, and I didn't see Zeke anywhere. Susa was stuffing something into her mouth while she watched. After a chorus of voices yelling "Mine!", I realized that it had to be Finding Nemo. That was a good movie. I pushed my hair out of my face, then sat up.

"Oh, you're awake!" Susa said after she swallowed a bite of her chicken salad sandwich.

"Somewhat…" was my mumbled my reply.

"That's good," she said happily, "I was getting worried. Well, more worried than before."

"What happened?" I asked.

"Well, I don't think you're an ordinary demigod."

"Uh…Okay? I know that I'm a daughter of the big three and all, which isn't ordinary, but what the heck are you talking about?" was my confused answer.

"I'm talking about how you froze the hellhound with the crazy ice," she said. Crap. I guess that I hadn't consumed any poisonous mushrooms after all. It's too bad considering how much simpler that would have made everything. "You saved Zeke's butt. Now he is out trying to find a map."

"Why is he trying to find a map while you watch Finding Nemo?" I asked.

"Because I won an argument," she said simply. I smiled at that since it was a completely Susa-like thing to do. But my smile vanished when I remembered the original conversation.

"So how did I freeze the hellhound?" I questioned. She replied after she chewed up some more sandwich.

"I can only think of one explanation, but it's not something to be too happy about. But it certainly isn't bad, either."

"Just tell me already," I said, trying to get Susa to go directly to the point.

"I think you have other family members that are or were demigods," she said then continued talking before I could ask any questions, "There have been several instances before when demigods have children if they live to adulthood. Most of the time they have kids with mortals, which would make the kids quarter-bloods. They aren't completely mortal, but they don't go to camp because they don't have a godly parent. And sometimes demigods have kids with other demigods. There isn't a official term for them, but they're usually called split half-bloods. They are half godly, but their parents aren't gods. There are a lot of mortals that have some trace of godly parentage deep within their roots- they just turn our to be very talented mortals. I think that your mom had some sort of godly parentage, and it was close on the family tree judging by the damage you can do." she finished. I just sat there for a moment, trying to take this all in.

"So you're saying I'm more powerful than other demigods?" I asked.

"In a way," she started, "but you're also in more danger. You're more than half godly, and monsters will be attracted to you like flies to honey. If you're Aunt is actually your Aunt, then she is part god too. She probably knew that you were over half god, and that's why she sent you to schools all over the world. If you had been in one place, you would have been swarmed. And when you were home, she probably eliminated some of the monsters herself."

"My Aunt is part god? That's an odd idea… But who are the other gods or goddesses that I'm related to?" I asked, "And do I have powers that are sort of like demigod powers for their children?"

"You're at least related to Chione, and maybe someone else. You only have partial powers for Chione, too. If you had been a daughter of Chione, you wouldn't have passed out when you froze the hellhound. You're most likely either one fourth or one eighth Chione, so you can only do so much. Do you know Briza from the Aeolus cabin?" she asked. **(A/N Aeolus is the god of the wind.)**

"The smart girl that's from Spain with the short hair?" I asked in return. She nodded.

"Her mother was a half-blood daughter of Athena. She's half Aeolus, one quarter Athena, and one quarter mortal. She isn't a daughter of Athena, but she acts a lot like one since they are directly related." Okay, I was beginning to understand. My memory snapped back to the dream I had the night we won capture the flag. What was it about again? Two goddesses talking to my dad about something? I couldn't remember. Susa shoved the last bit of her sandwich into her mouth. "You hungry?" She asked. I nodded vigorously. Being unconscious after freezing a hellhound the size of a double-decker bus really made you starving.

We went back to watching Finding Nemo on Susa's bed while having a feast of blueberry muffins and chicken salad sandwiches. When the movie was on the part where the fish in the tank were shouting out "Shark bait! Ew-ha-ha!" **(A/N I'm not sure if this is in order, but if the mine part comes after this pretend that it's correct.)**, Susa asked me if I liked moving around from school to school.

"I guess it's okay," I said, "but I've never really stayed in one place for a long time. How 'bout you?"

"I never moved because I was home schooled by my dad," she said. I was surprised because she didn't really seem like that kind of person.

"Where did you grow up?" I asked her.

"I'm from Salem, Massachusetts. You know, the place that's famous from the witch trials. My dad is an apothecary and has a little shop. He actually sells real stuff that works, but most of the people who buy stuff are tourists that want stuff to take home. That's how he met my mom. She's the goddess of magic and all, so she knows when someone knows it. And it's a dying tradition. If Hecate wasn't the goddess of dogs and entrances as well, then she would have faded a good while back. As it is, she still isn't the strongest goddess. In the times of Ancient Greece and Rome, she rivaled the Olympians, but ever since the Renaissance she's been headed downhill. Some dumbos decided to tell everybody that magic was evil." she said gloomily, then continued to watch Nemo. It seemed like as soon as the topic was changed she forgot about what she had just said, and was now watching the movie optimistically. I hadn't thought about that before. Some of the kids at camp always joked about Zeus and Poseidon fading because of air and water pollution, but some of the minor gods and goddesses, like Hecate, really were in danger. I thought about this for a while but eventually got caught up in Finding Nemo again. After a little bit, I heard the door open. Zeke came in, carrying a map and his backpack.

"I found a map," he said, then he looked up from the change he was sorting and saw that I was up. And alive, which I suppose was a good thing.

"Want a muffin?" Susa asked him, holding up the container that held the remaining muffins.

"Sure," he said, then took a muffin and sat down on the couch. He looked at what we were watching, then raised an eyebrow at us. "Finding Nemo?" he questioned. Susa nodded.

"It's really good," she said, then returned to watching it. It was nearly over, so she would be able to plot out our next steps soon.

"Hi," I said to Zeke.

"Uh… hi. Um... Thanks for saving me and all," he said.

"No problem," I said, then focused my gaze on the TV to prevent any awkwardness. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him open his mouth like he wanted to say something, but then close it after a minute. Then he opened it again, but this time to take a bite of his muffin. By the time Finding Nemo was over, my leg asleep from sitting on them. Susa turned the TV off with the remote, then studied the back of it. She opened the back of it up and took the batteries. I shot her a look.

"Do you really have to steal the batteries?" I asked her.

"We might need them, and if we do, we would need them much more than this motel does. So what are we going to do next?" she added, changing the subject as she stuffed the batteries into her backpack.

"We're should go to a bus station a bit closer to downtown. There's a bus that goes from here to Salt Lake City later this afternoon," Zeke said.

"Sounds like a plan," I said. Susa nodded in agreement, then threw away all the trash from our little feast. I brushed my tangled hair and changed the shirt that went over my UnderArmor shirt. The shirt that I put over it was a black shirt that said Virginia Beach in neon letters. When I got back to camp, I wanted to find someone from the Iris cabin who knew how to do colored streaks in my hair. I was getting tired of aqua and sea foam green, and I wasn't going to let the Aphrodite cabin come anywhere near my hair. Who knows what they would try to do to it. I was thinking maybe sea green and navy blue, but I wasn't sure.

Soon enough Susa, Zeke, and I were walking through the streets of downtown Phoenix. We got to the bus station and purchased our tickets, and after a hour or so of random conversations with Zeke and Susa, the bus came. Next stop: Salt Lake City. Final destination: Los Angeles.

**Yay! That makes 10 chapters and over 20,000 words! If you have any questions about the story ask them in a review so that I can try to answer them in the story. What? Did you think that I would just tell you? As if :D**

**The disclaimer is going to be said by Leo from the Lost Hero, which comes out this fall! I can't wait for it!**

**Leo: SomniumAstrum doesn't own Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Greek mythology, anything you recognize from real life, or the Heroes of Olympus series that I'm from. What happened to the Percy dude-**

**Me: AHHH! Don't tell them! Have them read the first chapter or whatever that's on the Barnes and Nobles website. Read it! It's really good! And as always- **

**REVIEW! **


	11. The Crazed Lady and an Angry Mob

**Chapter Eleven **

The ride was insufferable. There was a six hour ride until we got about halfway, then we got a hour break and we had to switch busses. Then there was another five hours. What kind of ride takes eleven entire hours?

Well, let me start off with what happened on the first bus. When we got on, it was about 6 pm in the afternoon. The bus was one with the reserved seats, and there were two seats on each side of the isle that went down the middle. That meant somebody would have to sit next to some random person. I called the window seat before we got on, even though I didn't believe in calling stuff. I hate cars since there's never anything to do, and I can get carsick pretty easily. But being near a window helps. My place by the window meant that either Zeke or Susa would have to sit next to a stranger while the other sat next to me. I didn't feel like Susa waging another argument since we didn't have enough time and I had a headache. In my opinion, the headache was caused by the hot, dry heat. But back to the previous topic. I made them agree that they would alternate seats when we switched busses, so that was the end of that issue.

Susa was to sit by me for the six hour trip that came first, and Zeke the last portion. I think Susa was glad that she wasn't in the lone seat first, since there was a crazy lady sitting in the seat next to it. Now I'm getting ahead of myself.

"Monday is the most likely day for someone to kill themselves on," the creepy lady next to Zeke said in a strange voice. He looked at her like she was a maniac, which she was, and then turned around and ignored her. This was the most recent of the many random, creepy facts that the lady had said within the ten minutes we had been on the bus. She was wearing a baggy floral dress, a floppy sunhat, and the biggest pair of glasses with normal lenses that I had ever seen. She looked like she was in her twenties, which was even stanger since you would expect her to be an old person that was loosing their mind. Oh, and she sort of looked like a puppet, even though if she had been a deity or under control of a deity of any sort Susa would be able to tell. I asked her, and she said that the lady that I'm going to call Glasses was just an abnormally creepy mortal.

"Are you sure she's just a mortal?" I asked Susa again.

"Definite," she said, and she looked definite too. But then again, Susa always knew what she was doing.

"Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet away from a toilet to avoid particles that fly through the air when you flush," I heard Glasses whisper to Zeke. He ignored Glasses, and Susa and I smiled since it was so hilarious to watch. Glasses continued on. "In Chinese, the KFC slogan 'finger lickin' good' comes out as 'eat your fingers off.'"

Susa and I both cracked up at that, but mostly because of Zeke's expression. It was somewhere between creeped out and annoyed, and all hilarious. Right about now I wished I had brought my camera along, so that I could give it to some of the Hermes kids at camp. It was that hysterical. Great minds think alike, and Susa had the same camera idea that I did. Only she had an idea of how to catch it.

We both had the newer Nanos, which means that they had video cameras on them. I wouldn't have thought of that by myself, but it was genius. I rustled through my bag and dug out my iPod as well.

Susa already had her camera rolling, and it didn't take long for me to get mine in operation as well. Zeke looked over at us after Glasses paused to sniff her fingers for some reason. He mouthed "help" then realized that we were taping this incident. He looked like he had been betrayed, and then Glasses poked him and said another fact. This continued on for about a half hour, and after about 15 minutes Susa and I stopped taping, decided it was enough. Zeke had eventually managed to zone out and ignore Glasses, but she poked him to get his attention.

"You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching TV," she said.

"Then why don't you take a nap?" Zeke asked hopefully. Her response was to pretty much collapse, sleeping, onto the window side of the bus, which was lucky for Zeke. He edged away from Glasses onto the far side of his chair before letting out a breath of relief. He spent the rest of the ride on that bus doodling something in a sketchbook. Susa and I alternated between listening to our iPods, chatting, and trying to solve logic problems. I wasn't very good at the logic problems, but Susa was. She could've been an Athena camper. I was glad that I was her friend, since any enemies she had, though she said her only enemies are gnomes with pointy hats , would be crushed like bugs.

Eventually, we made it to our halfway stop. I was exhausted, and Zeke and Susa looked pretty tired too. It had been a really long day, but mostly because of the bus ride and the fact that I had knocked myself out the morning of the day before. We snooped around the town a bit since we had some time. We went into a convenience store and got something to drink. I got some orange soda, which I usually stayed away from because my eyes tended to turn orange when I drank it, but I was too tired to care. Luckily, Zeke and Susa both got water so my eyes didn't turn orange unless I put the bottle up to my face to get a drink.

When we were leaving the store, I couldn't help but notice a lady who had been watching us from the back of the store. It wasn't Glasses, but she was probably in her 20s like Glasses. The lady in the store looked totally normal with straight red hair and brown eyes, except for the fact that she was sitting in a corner and watching us. When she realized that I was looking at her, she smiled, then took her cell phone out and started texting somebody. I didn't trust her, but she didn't follow us so it wasn't a big deal.

"There was something odd about that place, though I'm not sure what," Susa said as we made our way back to the bus terminal. I nodded, but didn't say anything about the lady who was watching us. If Susa knew something was weird with a place, there was definitely something up with it. I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but with Susa being a daughter of Hecate she can tell if there is a deity or monster nearby. She said something about that being caused by some crazy "spell" she did on accident.

At the bus terminal we just sat around, and I nearly fell asleep. I think Zeke almost did, too, but Susa didn't. It's like she could go on forever without getting tired. I absently wondered if that was a result of another "spell". I was pretty glad when the bus came, since I didn't think that I'd be able to stay awake to get on the bus much longer. We took our seats, and Susa was with a kid that was maybe eight or nine and obviously exhausted. The kid fell asleep almost instantly, and Susa just poked around with her logic puzzle book for a while.

I put my head against the window, and quickly fell asleep.

oooo

When I woke up, my first thought was that whatever my head was on something warm. For a minute I wondered what it was, then I realized that it couldn't have been the window since the window was fairly cold. I opened my eyes, and quickly sat up and glanced around. My head had been on Zeke's shoulder, but luckily he was asleep and hopefully hadn't seen that. I looked over to where Susa was, and was surprised to see that she looked like she was napping. But you could never tell with her. I wouldn't be surprised if she saw that and will make it come back to bite me. I looked at the clock on my iPod, and saw that it was only about 4:45 am. Since I had my iPod out, I decided that I would pass part of the last 15-20 minutes listening to it. About five minutes later the bus driver slammed on the breaks because the car in front of us had decided to suddenly slow down. There wasn't a wreck, but most of the sleeping passengers were awakened.

"What was that about?" Zeke asked groggily.

"The car in front of us slowed down too fast," was my response. I still had one of the earbuds to my iPod in my ear, but I could hear the others as well.

"Well, it looks like we're nearly there anyway so it wouldn't hurt to wake up," Susa said through a yawn. Either she really had been sleeping or she was really good at fake yawns. Susa and I were right about nearly being there. We were within the city now, and tall buildings were lining the streets.

Fifteen minutes later we were off the bus and trying to decide what to do.

"Should we keep going west or something?" I asked.

"I don't know…" Susa said, frowning.

"Why don't we get something to eat?" Zeke suggested. Now that he said it, I was kind of hungry too. I looked at Susa and raised an eyebrow.

"Sure," she said, "We could talk about what we plan on doing while we are eating." We left the terminal and headed down the street in search of a place to agree on. We had walked a couple of blocks when something started to happen. I wasn't sure what had gone down, but there was a huge group of people that looked very upset, almost like they were about to loose control. Like my neighbor's cat from when I lived in London got when my neighbor tried to give the poor thing a bath.

There were several shouts, then the people practically started on a riot or rampage or something like that. It was hard to describe, but it wasn't fun. Right before the crowd started to run amok, I saw something that unnerved me a lot. On the edge of the crowd was the lady with the red hair and brown eyes that I saw in the store the day before. She stood there smirking in victory as the crowd swirled around her and made her impossible to see.

"Oh, gods," I heard Susa mumble. There was a huge stampede of angry citizens headed down the street, with us in the way. Other people near us had ducked into a building or gone back up the street a while ago, so we were the only people in the area. I quickly glanced around and saw that most of the buildings around us were offices that were only open to the public on weekdays.

"Let's get out of here," I said. Nothing else was needed. Soon, we were sprinting down the street. I don't know if the mortals behind us were Olympic athletes or what, but they were all _really _fast. A couple of them in particular, and those were the ones that were gaining on us. They all looked normal when they got up close, except for their eyes. They were normal eyes, but they were sort of glazed over like they weren't the ones controlling their bodies. I'm guessing they weren't.

Susa led the way, and we always managed to shake them just long enough so that they wouldn't reach us. Every time they got too close, Susa would find some place where we could duck momentarily or turn. She was good at that, another thing to add to the list. After a while we managed to make it into the suburbs between Salt Lake City and the lake itself. The bad part was that the mob was following us. Suburbs contained many more places to help throw the mob off our trail but they somehow always found us after several minutes.

This hide and chase thing went on for an hour before it stopped. The only reason it stopped was because we reached the salt lake. The place was huge, and it smelled almost like the ocean. I smiled, knowing that we would be able to stay away from the rampaging mortals.

"Let's go," I said, then dove into the water. Susa came in right after me, and Zeke a second or two after that. I started to manipulate the water currents, and before long we were jetting across the lake. When we were pretty far out, I saw the crowd gather along the shoreline, all of them dead quiet. Then as soon as the rampage came, it went, leaving several hundred very confused citizens near the lake shore.

"Now _that _was odd," Zeke said.

"No kidding," Susa said dryly. I smirked, and continued to control the salty water swirling around us.

**There- a nice, exciting chapter to make up for chapter 10's suckyness. Sorry about Chapter 10, I needed to explain some things and had no clue what else to do. I actually have began to sort out the plot of my story, since I really didn't know how the entire middle was going to go. So now there shouldn't be any more really bad filler chapters. Right now it seems like it's sort of going in the direction of the Lightning Thief, but don't worry because that will vanish after a few chapters. If you have any questions about the story, ask them in a review so that I can try to answer the question in the story. CC is welcome, but no flames, as always. Ula is going to say the disclaimer today just 'cause.**

**Ula: SomniumAstrum doesn't own anything from the PJO series or anything you recognize from real life. But she does own me, Zeke, Susa, and all the other OCs in this story. That's why they're OCs. Review! It helps us make the story better!**


	12. Hugging Cerberus

**Chapter Twelve**

It took almost an hour for the currents to take us across the lake. I could have made the currents faster, but we had been running around for a hour or so and I wasn't in a rush to get out of the water again. But eventually we were there, and we had to move forward.

Turns out that the part of Utah that's northwest of the Great Salt Lake is nearly unpopulated. There was nothing around, and it was totally boring. Susa, Zeke, and I had some really random conversations and played some games that are meant for car rides as we walked.

"O, E, G, R, P," Zeke said. We were playing that car game where you take the five or six letters from a nearby license plate and turn it into a sentence, but we didn't have any license plates in the middle of nowhere so we were making the letters up.

"Ogres eat greasy… I don't know… red peas?" I said, bored out of my mind. We had been walking for a couple hours by this point.

"How 'bout ogres eat green red pandas?" Susa suggested.

"But if the panda is green then it isn't red," Zeke pointed out.

"Not if it's a red panda. They aren't just giant pandas that are red. They're a different species that's actually a closer relative to the raccoon then the giant panda," Susa said like it was obvious. Which it should be, in my opinion.

"This is getting old," I said.

"No kidding," was Zeke's reply.

"Well, what else is there to do?" I asked, defending my obvious statement. He shrugged.

"I don't usually get bored that easily. What do you do at home when you're bored with nothing to do?" he asked.

"I don't know. If I'm at home as in my Aunt's house in Aussie, then I usually go to the beach. But seeing as there isn't a beach here, that isn't going to happen," I said.

"I do really random stuff when I'm bored," was Susa's reply.

"Like what?" Zeke asked.

"I dunno. Like eat a bunch of tic-tacs and burn stuff with a magnifying glass. Or make up my own language that I forget within a day. Something like that," She said, then started to stair at the horizon to the left of us. There wasn't anything there and she tended to do that a lot, so I ignored it. We were all quiet for a really long time after that for no reason in particular. She eventually told us what she was thinking about. "How much of the prophecy do you think we have completed?" she asked. I wasn't sure since I had never bothered to think about it. She had a good point, though.

"How does the prophecy go again?" Zeke asked. It was just like him to forget something like that. Personally, I think the prophecy had been permanently burned into my mind.

"Well, let's see what we've done about the first verse," Susa suggested.

"Three converge in the Attic, which has been over with for a good while," I started, then continued, "The cause of a simple illusion- which I don't get. How can a mirage or whatever cause us to go into the Attic?" I asked.

"Allusion has two meanings," Susa replied, "It can mean evading someone or something _or _it could mean something like a brief reference. Ula, you're thinking of illusion when you say mirage. The one spelled with an "I". I think that was covered when I mentioned that there were a bunch of drachmas in the Attic…" she trailed off, waiting for someone else to continue.

"The next line was that diplomatic mission one," Zeke said, "and I think this mission is pretty diplomatic since it involves us stopping WWIII. But I don't like that failing from the exclusion part."

"Neither do I," was my response. Just then, we walked over a hill. There was a small town out in front of us, the kind that's suspicious of anybody or anything that isn't from around here. The sun was setting by now, and we stopped talking as we looked at our issue. We had food with us and I could summon water from the ground so that wasn't much of an issue. The best option would be to just go through the town without stopping.

"I don't feel like stopping," I said, "and there's no reason to. Let's just keep going." I got nods of agreement from Zeke and Susa. We walked across a small two lane road that was deserted, and into the cemetery on the other side. The sign read "Grouse Creek Cemetery." I don't know why we went in there. In fact, I don't think we even thought about it, but simply just went straight ahead. The place was filled with really old tombstones, and I didn't like it one bit. I hated cemeteries. I started to think of cemeteries, then of that Mexican day of the dead, then of that Scooby-Doo special about it, then of cartoon network. Man, I can get off topic. The place seemed to go on forever, but in reality it wasn't that big.

"What the Hades is that?" Zeke asked, breaking me out of my thoughts. A few rows of tombstones away next to a mausoleum, the ground was starting to break apart. Out of the cracks came what looked like some sort of sticky, sludgy black goo.

"It literally looks like something out of Hades," Susa said, "and I think we should get away from here." It was a good suggestion, but too bad for us, it was already too late. The cracks spread, weaving around the tombstones like a vine of black poison ivy. They circled us, and then the ground around us dropped a few feet. This was _not _good.

There were several more sharp splintering sounds all around us, and then the world turned into a black swirl as we started falling.

oooo

_What the heck just happened, _I thought as I became aware of my surroundings. All I knew was that I was laying on the wet ground in the dark, and someone else's back was pressed to mine. Then I remembered. This seemed to be happening a lot lately, with the blacking out then remembering. Zeke, Susa, and I had just fallen through a crack in the ground in a cemetery in Utah. Some luck.

I pushed myself up, then opened my eyes. It took a few seconds, but when they adjusted, I decided that we were either in an underground renaissance fair or we were Underworld. The latter was more likely, but gods know I would've preferred the renaissance fair to the Underworld.

I saw Susa a fair distance away, sitting on a rock and ripping her shirtsleeves up to bandage her wrist. Zeke had been right beside me, and that would've been awkward if he had awakened and saw that. I pushed myself up and walked over to where Susa was sitting, then sat down beside her.

"What happened?" I asked her.

"I think my wrist is either broken or sprained or something like that, but it shouldn't be a problem since it will heal soon enough with magic," was her answer.

"You sure?" I asked, wanting to double check even though I knew it wasn't necessary.

"Yeah. It'll probably be bad for at least a week. The only issue is that I'm fairly sure that I won't be able to use my bow if my wrist is like this." Good point. But seeing as I had no solution to the issue, I walked over to Zeke and tapped him on the back with my shoe. He didn't respond, so I kicked him. I was too impatient to wait.

"Ow…" he mumbled under his breath as he sat up and looked around. "What the heck happened?" he asked.

"We pretty much fell through the ground in a cemetery and into the Underworld. Lovely, no?" I said in response as I took a glance around. I could see a dark river swirling in the distance, along with what looked like a crowd of ghosts moving around, but I couldn't see anything clearly between the dim lighting and how far away it was.

"What's the plan?" Susa asked. I hadn't noticed that she had walked over to us. By now Zeke was standing and trying to brush some sort of gooey black dirt off of his hands. I looked at my own, and realized how dirty they were. I would have to deal with that later, along with my hair that kept falling into my eyes.

"I don't know… how about we walk over and see what the crowd of ghosts is about?" I suggested.

"That's probably were the gate is," she said while messing with the fabric tied around her wrist.

"What gate?" I asked.

"You don't know about the gate? Well, I guess that you didn't have time to learn all of that stuff. The gate is where the spirits of the diseased go to get into the correct part of the Underworld. I guess that we could check it out somehow," she said then marched off quickly, leaving Zeke and myself to follow her. We walked for about 20 or 30 minutes over empty ground to get there. There was no talking, but that's because Susa's walking was so fast that it was bordering on jogging. Actually, I think that she was walking faster than I could jog.

When we got to the gate, a few things stood out. The river I had seen from a distance was definitely the river Styx that I had heard about. It was black and had all sorts of trash and junk floating around in it. There were also a striking amount of souls moving around and getting into lines. Most went to that middle place of which I don't know the name, but there were a few that signed up to be judged for the Elysium. The thing that stood out the most was the terrifying, giant, three-headed watch dog that was coming straight at us. Susa ran up to it.

"What the Hades are you doing?" I yelled to her. She got to the dog, and out of all the bizarre things she could have done, she _hugged _it. I was sure that she was dead meat. To my amazement, the dog actually wagged its tail and looked happy. Susa finished hugging it, then jogged back to us. There were several spirits watching us now.

"Did you really just hug Cerberus?" Zeke asked her.

"Yeah! I love dogs! My mom is the goddess of dogs! And entrances too. Cerberus is awesome since he is a dog that guards one of the most important entrances in existence. He says that he'll take us to the castle if we want," she said in one breath.

"Are we going to the castle?" I asked.

"Where else are we supposed to go?" Zeke pointed out. I shrugged.

"C'mon!" Susa shouted, than ran up to Cerberus. He crouched down, and she jumped onto his back and sat down. Never in my life had I imagined that I would be riding a three-headed dog like a horse through the Underworld. Zeke and I followed, got on, and Cerberus took off. He leapt across the gate in a single bound, then started racing across the fields. The castle soon appeared in the distance, and it's size became evident in moments. We were going super fast, and even though the castle was far away, it was huge. There were tons of green Greek fire torches dotting the obsidian walls and skeletons patrolling the walls.

We had made it to the Underworld for sure.

**Yay! I finally got that chapter finished! Sorry it took a week. I wasn't feeling too inspired. The Lost Hero comes out on Tuesday! I'm so excited about it! I have officially commenced my countdown :D**

**Disclaimer: I don't own PJO or the Greek myths! Just Ula, Zeke, Susa, and most of the other OCs floating around my story.**

**I promise that I will have Chapter 13 up within a week! Review!**


	13. Don't Stop Believing

**Chapter 13**

"C'mon," Susa said as she jumped off Cerberus. Zeke jumped right after her, but I was a bit more careful as I climbed down. Susa hugged Cerberus again, then the giant three headed dog started running back towards the gate. I turned my attention to the castle.

"Do you think we should go in?" I asked.

"I dunno, but I'm guessing no. We aren't looking for anything in the castle, unless we want to ask something or someone about the location of the Dreamworld." Susa pointed out.

"I certainly don't want to talk to any of those skeleton goons, so I guess we should head off in some other direction. The question would be which direction we're supposed to go in," Zeke said. While he was talking, I noticed that a few of the "skeleton goons" had started to come out of the castle and some of the surrounding gardens and were starting to lurk near we were standing. I glanced at Susa, and she caught my gaze. There was definitely something fishy going on.

The skeletons continued to mass together until there was around thirty of the things. When they got up close, you could really see how disgusting they were. They were all wearing tattered armor and clothing, dating in time from Ancient Greece to modern day US military uniforms. The ones in the older uniforms were white bones, but some of the newer ones had tattered bits of flesh clinging on. And they smelled horrible, like a dumpster full of rotting leaves and fish. They all turned towards us and started to march forward. I began to reach for my bracelet and Zeke his hare foot keychain, but we were grabbed from behind. I couldn't see who it was, but it was horrible. The bony fingers that were wrapped around my wrists still had bits of flesh on them. I gagged. The soldier that was holding Zeke's wrists was wearing Roman armor, but lucky for him they were just bones. A skeleton wearing Medieval knight armor grabbed Susa's wrists, and she winced. The soldiers pushed us forward and into the castle.

After being shoved along various passageways and corridors that seemed like a huge maze to me, we wound up in a large room with vaulted ceilings. The skeletons shoved us and released our wrists, then retreated to the entrance of the room. I soon saw that this was the throne room, since there were two 8' tall people sitting on some pretty huge chairs. The man was sitting on an obsidian throne and he had fairly short, black hair and eyes that were like a rat's- black. I assumed that he was Hades. The woman was on a throne made out of withered flowers. Her hair was blonde and she had dark green eyes. She looked bored out of her mind. I was guessing this was Persephone, but she wasn't supposed to be here at this time of year.

"Why have you come to my domain?" Hades asked, interrupting my thoughts.

"Ummm… for our quest," Zeke said.

"I'm aware that you are on a quest, but there is no reason for you to be here," he argued.

"We're looking for the Dreamworld," I said, "and in the Greek 'myths' they say that it's in the Underworld. So we came down here."

"Foolish children. The Dreamworld hasn't been located down here for centuries. It moved away during the Renaissance since there were too many people with too many dreams and wishes. But your mistake does make my issue a little bit easier," he said, obviously angry about something.

"What issue?" Susa asked.

"Haven't they told you what my foolish brothers and I are fighting about? If they haven't then it may be the ruin of your mission," he paused to catch his breath. Or at least I thought it was to catch his breath… do gods even have to breathe? "A few weeks ago, we were holding a somewhat emergency meeting on something I'm not allowed to discuss. We got into a conversation about our children, and with one thing leading to the next, we ended up insulting each other's children," at this moment I wondered if the gods had ADHD like their children, then mentally smacked myself for being all ADHD and missing part of the speech. "…We have each demanded each other's apologies, but you're not going to get it as far as I'm concerned."

"Why not?" Zeke asked.

"Because!" Hades boomed, "Your pathetic quest does not have someone representing my side of the argument! You are children of Hecate, Cybele, and my brother Poseidon. Hecate refuses to take a side, Cybele is with Zeus, and Poseidon owes me an apology! If you have a quest for peace, you had better have people for each side of the argument!" I was about to object, but he yelled over me. It was a good thing too, since the sentence would probably have been messed up since the only thing I could think about was the fact that Zeke was going to be on Zeus's side. "Servants! Lock them up!"

The skeletons grabbed onto us again. I looked over my shoulder to see Hades glowering, but Persephone had an odd expression on her face, like she was weighing the consequences of something. Just then the skeletal guard shoved me out of the room and into a dark hallway, headed for the dungeon.

oooo

I sat on the stone floor next to Susa.

"Do you think there is a way out of here?" Zeke asked while pacing around the edges of the room and occasionally kicking the stones.

"I doubt it. Why would they put a way to escape into the cells?" Susa snapped back while messing with the bandages on her wrist. We had been in the cell for an hour or two, but we had been quiet for a long time.

"Then how the heck are we supposed to get out?" Zeke asked.

"We aren't supposed to get out," Susa said slowly like she was addressing a particularly stupid child, "That's why Hades had us locked in a cell instead of putting us somewhere nice, like…I don't know? Hawaii? I've always wanted to go to Hawaii."

"I've never been to Hawaii either," I said, "And I really want to go there. Surfing is awesome."

"Can we stay on topic for once?" Zeke asked impatiently. He looked nervous, and a sudden thought came to my mind.

"Are you claustrophobic?" I asked. He sighed.

"A little. It just isn't natural to be stuck in a small space. Open air is much better."

"Oh…that makes sense," I said, "I don't like heights at all, if it makes you feel better." He shrugged, and continued pacing. A few minutes later, a woman's hand came through the wall, followed by the person it belonged to. Or should I say the goddess it belonged to.

"I don't have much time, so I must speak fast before I send you on your way," Persephone said, "I do not wish to be on my husband's side of this argument, but he is forcing me to be. I would much rather be on the neutral side, staying in the Dreamworld. As a way of helping out the side of the war I'd like to be on, I'm going to send you three to the place in the mortal world that holds the entrance to the Dreamworld. Hades will note my disappearance soon, so I must send you now. Good luck." After she finished her rushed speech, she held out her hand and closed her eyes. Vines grew up out of the soil, and quickly climbed around us. Within moments, it was impossible to see through the curtain of leaves, and I felt the ground disappear from beneath my feet. I had a moment of panic, but before I could start squirming around I felt my feet touch down again. The vines sank into the ground, and I looked around. We were in a forest full of tall, skinny trees. The leaves on the branches weren't thick, so you could see the sky, which was reddish going on a darker blue.

"Where are we?" I asked.

"No idea…" Susa said.

"Well, we can find out in the morning," I declared, "cause I'm exhausted and I don't feel like walking around." I plopped down on the ground, and tried to remember the last time I was slept. When I realized that it was the bus ride, I mentally groaned. Jeez… I was too tired to groan correctly.

"Sounds like a plan," Zeke said, sitting down next to me. There wasn't a clearing, but the trees were far enough apart that they wouldn't catch on fire when one was started. So that's what Susa did. Of course, all she had to do was clear some leaves away from a bit of ground and snap her fingers. The fire was purple, which was totally awesome.

My eyes were starting to close, but then I heard a twig snap behind be in the forest. I jerked wide awake, ready for whatever it was, though with my luck it would be a dormouse or something equally stupid. I was totally wrong.

Susa was the only one with a view behind me, and when she looked back, her eyes went wide. That was all she had time for. An arrow flashed by my head, the moonlight illuminating the white fletching. The arrow was too fast to stop, and we were all to tired to do anything anyway. The arrow launched itself into Susa's ribs, and when I saw that I was turned around and on my feet in a heartbeat. When I turned around, I saw a beefy man with ram's horns holding the bow, and a woman behind him. I knew instantly who the man was, and I recognized the lady from the convenience store as well as from the mob.

"Sorry little demigods," Ares spat out, "but the little witch was a risk that we weren't willing to take."

"What the Hades are you two idiots talking about?" I yelled at them. The woman stiffened.

"I'd watch your language, child," she said with a voice that made her sound insane. In fact, I was sure that she was insane.

"Let her say what she wants," Ares grunted, "These two won't be a threat to our plans."

"What plans? I'll I see you two doing is killing!" I shouted back. Ares laughed.

"You see, children," the woman began, "we _want _all of the other gods and goddesses to fight. It means more power for us, especially if it means another world war."

"You're Eris…" Zeke said. When he said that, I realized that he was right. Eris and Ares were working together to push the world towards war and chaos.

"No really?" Eris said scathingly, but with a maniacal grin. "I'd love to kill you two as well, but frankly, we're on a schedule and don't have any time to fool around. Come on, Ares."

I ripped of my bracelet, and it turned into my sword. I wanted to rush at them before they vanished, not caring if I was turned to powder when they got all godly. But someone else did care. Zeke knocked me over so I didn't look at them, but that also meant that I couldn't send them to Tartarus. By the time I pushed myself back up, they were gone. I was angry, but glad Zeke did that since I hadn't really been thinking. In a daze, I walked over to Susa and sat down next to her. She was still alive, but barely. And I knew that there wasn't anything I could do to help her. The arrow was coming out of her ribs on her right side, and she was coughing up blood. But she managed to say one thing.

"Don't stop… believing." I started to cry. The words meant a ton by themselves, but they were also personal since they belonged to her favorite song. Only a week or so ago she told my why she loved that song. She had said that it was true, that you can never stop believing. It just wasn't possible. I did the only thing that I could think of to say thank you. I started to sing.

"Just a small town girl  
Livin' in a lonely world  
She took the midnight train  
Goin' anywhere.

Just a city boy  
Born and raised in South Detroit  
He took the midnight train  
Goin' anywhere.

A singer in a smoky room  
A smell of wine and cheap perfume  
For a smile they can share the night  
It goes on and on and on and on.

Strangers waiting  
Up and down the boulevard  
Their shadows searching  
In the night.

Streetlights, people  
Livin' just to find emotion  
Hidin', somewhere in the night.

Workin' hard to get my fill  
Everybody wants a thrill  
Payin' anything to roll the dice  
Just one more time.

Some will win  
Some will lose  
Some were born to sing the blues  
Oh, the movie never ends  
It goes on and on and on and on.

Strangers waiting  
Up and down the boulevard  
Their shadows searching  
In the night.

Streetlights, people  
Livin' just to find emotion  
Hidin', somewhere in the night.

Don't stop believin'  
Hold on to the feelin'  
Streetlights, people  
Don't stop believin'  
Hold on  
Streetlights, people"

I was practically sobbing by the end, and it was all I could do to keep the last stanza unbundled. Susa's eyes were closed, and she had stopped breathing at the end of the song. Within a minute of the time she stopped breathing, something even stranger than everything else that happened today took place. Susa's body started to look almost like a mirage or a hologram. She got really bright, then she turned into a cloudy grey fog. With a pop, the fog expanded outward, and there wasn't anything left. But for some odd reason, I knew that this probably wouldn't be the last of her. She was too persistent to be forgotten forever.

oooo

I squinted in the sunlight as a rainbow came into view. Zeke and I were sitting in a parking lot in Eastlake, Michigan trying to IM camp. Zeke adjusted the position of the prism he brought with us, and the rainbow got large enough to be able to see the colors. I threw a drachma into it and asked Iris to give us Chiron. His face appeared, and it looked like he was checking some papers in the office of the Big House.

"Ula, Zeke! It's good to see you! Where's Susa?" he asked. We didn't respond, and he made a pretty accurate guess on why. "Oh Zeus no… what happened?"

"She's dead," I said bluntly, not wanting to go into detail. Chiron frowned.

"I'll tell the camp and have her burial shroud prepared. Oh, and one thing."

"What?" Zeke asked.

"Children of Hecate don't have a tendency to die like other demigods and mortals," he said, then the door to his office opened and he had to cut the message short. "Good luck." He waved his hand through the message, and it cut off leaving an empty rainbow. I looked to Zeke.

"Don't stop believing…?" I asked him, and he offered me a hand to help me stand up.

**DON'T KILL ME!**

**I'm on the verge of tears so I'm not gonna talk. **

**Disclaimer: I don't own PJO, anything from real life, or Don't Stop Believing.**


	14. Fred the Fedora

**Chapter Fourteen**

Zeke and I were sitting in a booth at a Dairy Queen and eating lunch. Earlier that day, we had crossed some sort of lake and we were now in Manistee, Michigan instead of Eastlake. **(A/N Just thought I'd tell you people that most of the places I use actually exist. I get them from Google Earth :P) **I sat there picking at my blizzard. Usually I loved the things, but I didn't feel like eating it. It tasted like plastic, not frozen sugary goodness. I absently wondered what color my eyes were. Probably white… which would've looked really weird.

"I'm going to the bathroom," I told Zeke, who nodded but didn't look up from whatever he was drawing. When I got into the bathroom, I took a glance in the mirror. I had my blizzard with me so I could throw it out, but my eyes weren't white like the ice cream. They were blue, probably the effect lake Michigan since it was so close. When we were coming across the lake that separated Eastlake and Manistee most of the dirt had washed off of Zeke and myself since I allowed us to get wet, but my hair was a wreck. I hadn't brushed it in…well, forever. Not since I blacked out after the hellhound incident. I did a quick calculation in my head. Well, I actually counted on my fingers, but you know what I mean. So the first day of the Quest was spent in New York and walking to Phoenix, the next day was spent with me blacked out, and after that we took a bus to Salt Lake City. Then we went through the Underworld and the end of a night as well as all of that day there, and then we've been in Michigan since last night. That means this was our sixth day, which probably wasn't good since we were told to hurry.

I cast a glance out the window near the ceiling of bathroom to look at the sky. It was an odd color- sort of a greenish blue. Oddly enough, that isn't what caught my attention. The bathroom had stone walls, and right below the window there was an unusual light filtering through the cracks. As I watched, it started to get brighter. Mortals were passing it by without a second glance, so it had to be my imagination. It was casting a glow on the bathroom, and something clicked in my head. The reason why the mortals weren't reacting was because they were _mortals,_ of course! I cautiously walked over to it, waited for a minute or two as the mortals gave me weird looks, then reached my hand out into it.

I was right: that wasn't a wall. It was some sort of mirage. I decided it was safe to look into it since my hand didn't feel bad from being in there. I started to slide my head towards and into the wall. I'll tell you right now, it's hard to intentionally try to shove your head through something. My eyes went right through the cinder blocks, but then met with something that felt like saran wrap, but I didn't have time to pull my head back since it gave way almost instantly. I opened my eyes, and fell backwards and back into the bathroom. I got back up and tried again, this time prepared for the sight that was waiting for me.

Of course, I was still dumbfounded when I looked again. There was so much happening, I wasn't sure where to start. Near where my head was coming through, there was a plain meadow with green grass stretching on for about a mile in front of me and it seemed to go on for eternity behind me. The sky was a pale pinkish red, even though it was around noon. But the most amazing part was what existed past the grass in front of me. There was a huge span of fencing that had to be at least 12' tall that went across the edge of the meadow, and the only breaks were two huge gates. One of the gates was pitch black and totally creepy looking, and the other was made out of pure white animal horns. The land beyond the fences was divided in two halves, one that was the dark gate side and the other was on the same side as the horn gate. Half of the landscape was mostly black stone dotted with dead grass, while the other half was a blaze of colors. There was a huge mountain range that went across the horizon, and another fence separating the two sections. I knew what this place was. I pulled my head back out of the wall, and dashed out of the bathroom.

"I know where we have to go!" I said to Zeke. He looked up from his drawing and cast me a weird look.

"Do you realize that you just went to the bathroom and came back with an answer to our issue of finding the Dreamworld?" he asked, trying to look serious though I could tell he was holding back laughter. I frowned at him, but otherwise ignored that comment.

"I found the entrance, so come on!" I persisted, grabbing his arm in a death lock and hauling him after me. He realized where we were headed, and managed to get his arm away from me.

"There's no way you're getting me to go into the girls' bathroom," he said.

"Just come _on_," I said. We were right outside the entrance near the water fountain, and I poked my head into the bathroom. There was only one person in there, but they weren't in the main area, so if we went fast enough she wouldn't see us. "There's not even anyone in it right now," I said, lying a little.

"Oh really?" he asked. I was a terrible liar.

"Stop being so stubborn."

"But what if someone sees me in the girls' bathroom?" he asked.

"Too bad," I said, then managed to grab his arm again and pull him in after me. He stopped trying to pull away when he saw the light, but he still didn't seem that thrilled to be in there. I jumped into the wall fully this time, and Zeke followed. When he saw where we were, he looked dumbfounded.

"What the heck is the entrance to the Dreamworld doing in a Dairy Queen girls' bathroom?" he asked while gazing out across the landscape. I just shrugged.

oooo

"This place is so weird," I said as we passed a tall, blue tree that had strange fruits hanging from it. We were on the side that had the gate of horn, and this place could definitely be out of some wacko dream. There were fantasy animals running around, the plants looked like they were out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and even the inanimate objects were nuts. Zeke and I were at the crest of a hill, but not quite at the mountains yet. Looking down to the base of the hill, you could see a herd of some sort of animal that looked like a cow with feathers. They came in all sorts of colors and they were grazing on what looked like a football field. Or a soccer field, depending on where you're from.

"No kidding," Zeke mumbled. We stood there for a moment, me gawking at the feathered cows while he was zoned out. "If this side has all of the random, normal dreams that mortals have, does it mean that the other side is made of nightmares?" he asked. Oh… I hadn't thought of that, though now I was 99% sure that it was made of nightmares.

"I guess, but I'm not going to go over there to find out," was my answer.

"Wasn't planning on it," he said. We walked in silence for a while, but eventually we topped another hill and saw where we were headed. The mountain range that ran horizontal across the Dreamworld was _huge._ The biggest of the mountains was probably taller than Mt. Saint Helens. I'm not sure how we couldn't see how big they were until now, but I think it was because the foothills were a fair amount taller than the gates. Then I realized a huge issue.

"How are we supposed to get past the mountains?" I asked.

"I could probably get over them fairly easily since my mom is the goddess of mountains and all, but I don't see any way that I could take you with me if I did that," he said. The mountains were all super tall, and they went across the length of the nightmare realm as well. As far as I could see there weren't any passes that we could cross over. Zeke was frowning while he was staring at the mountains. The fence didn't continue onward past the mountains since they were so tall. It just went to the edge of a cliff that was fairly high up, then ended. While I was looking at the end of the fence, I noticed that there was a little speck gliding down the side of the mountain. At first I thought it was another crazy dream animal, but as it got closer I realized it was a person. I tapped Zeke on the shoulder to get his attention.

"Look," I said while pointing to the growing speck, "I think it's a person." I was right. Within a minute, a remarkable speed considering the size of the mountain slope, the snowboarder had come to a halt in front of us. The snowboarder lifted the goggles, and I got a good look at her. She had blonde hair, purple eyes, and she wasn't dressed like she had been snowboarding, other than the goggles. She was wearing a black corduroy dress, patterned tights, boots, and a trench coat. Odd fashion choice, but it wasn't like it mattered.

"Hi! What are you doing out here?" she asked, but didn't stop for a response, "I'm Lacey! Are you two that quest group that they were talking about?" she asked, then looked around.

"Uh…," Zeke said, "Yeah, we're the quest group. And, well, we're out here because we're the quest group."

"That makes sense," Lacey said, "Sorry about that…I talk too fast sometimes… Well! I suppose you're going to want to see the Oneroi. I know where the castle is, so that won't be a problem."

"The prophecy said that we'd be getting help from the Dreamworld, so I guess we want to go to the castle," I said, then looked at Zeke. He shrugged.

"Okeydokey! How do you guys want to get over them? Ohhhhhh I want to go in a hot air balloon! It's almost as fun as snowboarding!" she said excitedly.

"You have a hot air balloon?" I asked, then added a bit too fast, "If you do then I don't want to go in it."

"Okay…," she said dejectedly, then brightened, "And yes, I do have a hot air balloon! My dad gave me it!" she said happily, then started to examine the back of her snowboard. I started to think about how she was almost like a hyper, shorter version of Susa, but then I stopped myself cause it hurt to think about my now dead best friend. **(A/N Not sure if anyone remembers from when I first introduced Susa, but she is/ was really tall. Lacey is just average height.) **

"Who's your dad?" Zeke asked.

"Oh! He's Phantasos! One of the rulers of this realm since he's an Oneroi. I don't understand why people think Morpheus is the sole controller of dreams… My dad and Phobetor have a role here too!" she said with one big breath. After she caught her breath, she continued on much more calmly, "In case you didn't know, Phantasos is the god of inanimate objects in dreams. That's why I have this," she said while gesturing to her snowboard, "It's what my dad gave me when he claimed me. Here in the Dreamworld, it can turn into any inanimate object that I want it to. Out in reality it is a fedora that can turn into a helmet, which is very stupid. Except for the fedora part! Fedoras are awesome!" she finished, getting hyper again at the end.

"So we're going to cross the mountain on a magic fedora?" I asked. I did not want to be in the _sky _on a _hat. _

"HADES YEAH!" Lacey shouted. I looked at her nervously.

"No offense, but I _really _dislike heights," I said, being a total party-pooper. But Lacey found a way around it.

"We can just fly really low! It's magic after all!" I was about to start talking, but she burst into song,"Every little thing she does is magic Everything she does just turns me on Even though my life before was tragic Now I know my love for her goes on"

"The Police?" Zeke asked. Lacey nodded her head so much I thought it might fall off.

"That's not my favorite song though. But _anyway_, let's get going!" she declared. I was surprising that she could actually get back on topic. Both Zeke and I were horrible at that. She took her snowboard, and held it up in the air so that it caught in the red sunlight. There was a flash from where it reflected, and I couldn't look at the bright red glare. When I looked again, there wasn't a snowboard there. There was a huge deflated purple balloon with attached basket. "I wish that you could get sunlight like this in reality… I might actually consider _thinking _about living there," she said.

"You live in this place?" I asked. I far as I had seen, it was all crazy things from dreams.

"Well of course!" she said like it should have been obvious. Lacey then skipped over to the balloon and pressed a button on the rim of the basket. The balloon immediately began to inflate itself in preparation for take-off.

"Do normal hot air balloons do that?" Zeke asked.

"Nope! As I said, this here is a magic balloon. Or fedora. Let's call it Fred, 'cause that's what I named it!" she exclaimed, then skipped over to check on progress. I looked over at… Fred. It was weird to address a magic fedora-balloon as Fred. To my surprise, I saw that the bal- erm, _Fred _was inflated and ready to go. Fred's balloon was purple and swaying slightly in the wind, and it would have been very pretty had I not been convinced that I would fall out of it as soon as I got twenty feet up into the air. But then I realized something- this air wasn't controlled by Zeus. And if Fred was magic, I shouldn't fall out. That was good news, and I didn't think that I would be too freaked out as long as we stayed near the ground. I got onto Fred the balloon, and ended up closing my eyes as soon as we got into the air. **(A/N First of all, I'm actually afraid of heights, so I know how Ula feels. Second, the paragraph directly below my mini author's note was written by BFF SpiritusAstrum. I am incapable of making anything like it.)**

I stood there in shock as I felt the breeze hit me. My eyes were closed and the only thing that seemed to exist in the real world was the little piece of the basket my feet were touching. I willed myself to not open my eyes and look down since it would scare me even more, and I wasn't planning on changing my mind. I heard Zeke's voice, assuring me that everything was going to be okay, but his voice seemed distant. Like in another world, not on my little island. I felt the basket sway a little as someone moved, and I soon found out it was Zeke when he did something I couldn't believe. He reached for my hand and squeezed it. When he was holding my hand, it didn't feel like there was only my lonely island that I may fall off of at any moment. I reluctantly squeezed it back, telling him that I was still alive. I existed. His hand was really warm and a little clammy, but I didn't care.

After an antagonizing amount of time with Fred rocking back and fourth and me having a death grip on Zeke's hand, I felt the basket bump a little as we landed. I peeked open my eyes, and confirmed that we were indeed touching the ground. I got out of the basket as quickly as I could, and then sat down on some nearby rocks. I leaned my face on my hands, and tried to recover.

"You okay?" Lacey asked. I managed to look up and nod at her. She looked appeased by my nod, and went over to Fred the hot air balloon. Reaching inside the rim, she pulled out a little piece of glass from a pouch and put it in the sunlight. It had the same effect as it did on the snowboard, and soon there was a tan fedora sitting on the ground. Lacey picked it up and put it on, and with her trench coat the she must've buttoned up during the flight she looked like a detective. A very hyper detective. I looked in the other direction to see what was there, and the sight blew my breath away. I was staring at the other side of the mountains, and built into the slope was a giant castle. It was half obsidian and half marble with small adornments that were purple. The castle had to be the biggest structure I had ever seen, and that was saying something since my aunt had taken me to see so many places. There was a huge garden in the front that consisted mostly of purple poppies, but they were mixed in with just about anything you could imagine. Scratch that- anything you could dream of.

"Well, there's the castle," Lacey said happily.

**Ha! I finished the chapter, and it was actually long! Sorry it came late. I had no clue where to start, by SpiritusAstrum helped me out a ton and gave me the starting point of the portal in the girls' bathroom. THANK YOU SPIRITUS! Okay, so I probably won't be able to get the next chapter up until I find an idea that jumpstarts my brain since it's fried from school and Eris (my writer's block that Spiritus has temporarily held at bay). So I want to hear ideas- no matter how ridiculous they may be. And I also want to know if you like the "Zula" that Spiritus wrote. She's really good at romance and such. You people need to read her story Flower of Sleep if you liked it! It even runs parallel to this story, so it will pay off in the end anyway. To the disclaimer!**

**SomniumAstrum: I don't own PJO, the Police, Greek Mythology, or anything you recognize from real life. I own most of the OCs in this story though. And I'd LOVE to own Leo Valdez from The Lost Hero, but that probably won't happen. And I'm not gonna make a fanfic about him either because I'm not good enough. Okay, off topic.**

**Toodle-oo!**


	15. An Abundance of Poppies

**Chapter Fifteen**

After we got over our epic balloon ride on Fred, we made our way to the castle. As it turns out, Lacey was a horrible tour guide. Even before we got into the place, she started talking about the poppies that were growing outside, and to be frank, I didn't care. But by the looks of it, she was going to lead us through the entire place without stopping. When we entered the building, I decided to ask her exactly what we were planning on doing.

"Are you going to try to show us the entire castle?" I asked her.

"Yeah! This place is really cool, even though once I show you where something is it will probably change not long afterward," she said happily.

"What do you mean by it will change?" Zeke asked.

"Well, this place reflects dreams. They're indistinct and imprecise, and so is this castle. The floor plan always changes eventually, though some places are more stable than others," she explained.

"Shouldn't we go and talk to the Oneroi before you give us the grand tour? We don't technically have a deadline, but it won't be good if we delay," I said.

"No worries," Lacey announced, "Time passes differently here than it does in reality. Here, it's always one of the 12s on the clock. Most of the time it's noon, but if more people are dreaming about night, then it's midnight. All of the clocks you people have brought in are frozen on one of those two," she added. I looked at the waterproof watch I was wearing, and it confirmed this.

"So it will be the same time when we come out?" I asked.

"Well, no," Lacey said, "It just doesn't pass in here, and it will spit you out at a random time depending on both how long you've been in here and what you've been doing. For example, what year is it out in reality?" Lacey asked.

"2010," Zeke said. Lacey looked mildly surprised at this.

"I was born in 1990 and entered the dream world in 2001. Even though it's been nine years out there, I'm only two years older. There's even part of the Nightmare realm where time doesn't pass at all. Phobetor's only living child stays in that part, and she's been there since the fall of the Roman Empire. She's really smart, and occasionally she requests stuff to look at from reality just to keep up with everything. But trust me, you do _not _want to be the person put in charge of finding what she wants. The duty fell to me last time, and I was careening around 2005 trying to find all the junk she wanted like it was some massive scavenger hunt. And what was worse was the fact that I had only spent a couple months in the dream world and four years had passed, so I was totally unused to everything out there. Since then I've always looked carefully at dreams to see what sort of new stuff has come out. It's interesting to know that I'd be around twenty right now," Lacey finished, then started skipping towards the castle's drawbridge. I think I could see why she was crazy. I'd bet that it wouldn't be pretty if that happened to me.

"So do you think it's safe to just spend time here?" Zeke asked.

"I don't know," I answered truthfully, "But I don't want to spend too much time here because I'd probably go nuts," I said, not wanting to call Lacey nuts directly. Zeke nodded in agreement. He had a weird expression on his face that I couldn't read, but I decided not to ask about it. Instead, I focused on catching up to Lacey.

As it turns out, the inside of the castle was ridiculously awesome. Parts of it actually looked like they belonged in an old castle, but there were parts that didn't. An example of this was the hallway we were walking down at the moment. It had carpet, off-white walls, and it smelled like nutmeg, and if I didn't know better I would've thought we had entered somebody's house. But all the windows were reminders of how we were in the dream world. All of the hallways had doors on one side and windows on the other. This also means that there was a ton of courtyards, but somehow they were arranged so that they didn't seem methodical at all. They just ambled aimlessly about and somehow ended up like that.

At the end of the hallway there was a big door that led into another courtyard. Each of the courtyards had tons of poppies in it, but they were always cool colors like purple, blue, white, and green. I had never seen green flowers before, but I guessed that anything could exist here. In fact, almost all of the castle was painted in cool colors, or the parts that had stone walls had cool-colored accessories and stuff. Unlike most of the other castles I had seen before, the towers weren't on the four corners of the castle. The biggest tower was smack dab in the center of the castle, while there were six smaller ones in a circle around it. We entered one of the smaller spires as we exited the courtyard.

"All of the towers have interesting structures in them," Lacey said as we stared up at a huge library that went to the roof. We weren't technically in the library, since it was inside huge, rotating glass pillar that we could walk around. It sort of looked like one of those display stands that they display give-away cars on at malls and whatever except it was bigger with glass walls and full of books.

"I know a lot of people that would really like that library," I said. Lacey smiled.

"It's one of the reasons I stay in the dream world. Those books are all fantasy, and since my dad is sort of a minor god I actually don't have dyslexia," she said before leading us around the library and into a huge hexagonal room that also contained the largest spire.

"This is the throne room," Lacey announced. There was a throne directly in front of me, as well as one on either side of that. The spire that was above us was empty other than a large stained glass roof that made a broken picture on the floor with the noon sun. Surprise surprise, the picture that it made was of a red poppy. I also noticed that there was a large planter behind the largest throne that held a lone red poppy.

"What's with all of the poppies?" I asked Lacey. The place was overflowing with them, and by now I wanted to know why.

"It's the sacred symbol of both the Oneroi and their father, Hypnos, the god of sleep. The poppy that's directly behind Morpheus's throne is the most important of them all. There's only one other that's identical to it, and it's in Hypnos's realm in the Underworld. That's the item that keeps dreams in your sleep, and not other places. And it's also what inspires people. Imagine what would happen if the mortals didn't dream anymore. It may not look like it, but that flower is super important and also guarded," she finished, then turned and led us out of a different exit. We walked on for a good while, passing by a spire that contained what looked like virtual fireworks all over the place. We went down a hall that had hardwood floors and cracked plaster walls, then stopped in front of an antique door with a glass handle.

"Wait right here for a second," Lacey said, "This is my room and I think I have some really cool maps to give you guys." She opened the door and disappeared inside.

"What do you think of all this?" I asked Zeke.

"I think it's all really strange. Nothing seems to be limited, but in a way that is kind of creepy," he said while looking out the nearest window at the mountains. He was right, I though as I scratched absently at my ankle through my jeans. Sometimes it was really frustrating that there were limits to everything, but without them it seemed so… empty, almost. It was empty, but too full with possibilities. What an oxymoron.

"Okay!" Lacey announced as she came out of her room. She didn't have her trench coat on anymore, but she was carrying two scrolls. She unraveled them to show them to us. "These are blueprints to the castle. As you can see, the castle is always rearranging itself," she said as she pointed down to a room that was inching its way around to a different hallway among other things, "and that can make it hard to navigate. My dad gave these to me when I moved in, but I don't need them right now so you can have them," she completed, then gave us each a scroll.

"Thanks," I said as I continued to scratch at the lower half of my leg. It was really itchy for no reason.

"Your leg is leaking," Lacey said worriedly. I looked down to see that she was right. Where I had been scratching at my ankle earlier, it had begun to bleed.

"That's weird," I muttered, "I guess I scratched it too hard and scraped some skin off." I wouldn't have been surprised if that was what had happened since I always forgot to cut my nails and they could get really long without me noticing. Lacey frowned.

"I doubt it," she said, "You should check to make sure." I did, and I wasn't happy about what I found. Starting at the end of the jeans, my skin was all messed up. It looked like lots of blisters that you get when you're outside in the winter when the snow is all icy and blowing sideways and you don't want to go inside because you live in Australia where it doesn't snow and the ice cuts your face up and so on. **(A/N Yes, I know that was a lot of ands. It's supposed to be that way since some people talk like that when they're telling a mini story like that.)**

"That's not good," Zeke said.

"Way to point out the obvious," I mumbled. I don't know what was up with the jeans, but when they weren't touching the cuts, the cuts hurt like crazy.

"Tour over," Lacey said, "I'm just gonna show you to your rooms then we can figure out what we're going to do." She then took off down the hallway, and we were forced to follow her since we wouldn't be able to find her if she lost us in the maze of a castle.

We were led to a hallway that looked like it belonged in a normal castle. It had stone walls, stone floors, oak doors, and those little windows that are shaped like arrow heads. Lacey opened two of the doors, and shoved Zeke towards one and led the way into the other.

"I'll be back real quick. You can borrow a pair of my shorts cause I bet that you don't want to wear those jeans again. Don't go anywhere since I probably won't be able to find you," she said before parading out. The room that I was to stay in was pretty interesting. It looked like someone took the back porch at my Aunt's and put it indoors, with a bunch of vines and fountains growing up the latticed walls. In one of the corners there was even a fountain that created a rainbow with a small pile of drachmas below it. Seeing it reminded me of how I had neglected to IM my Aunt or even Genvieve. Before I could even make a step towards the fountain, Lacey came charging back in.

"Here," she said as she tossed me a pair of black corduroy shorts, "And do whatever you want. You have all the time you want." she made another grand exit before I could ask her what was up with the black corduroy. Her dress was made of the stuff and so were the shorts. I wondered if it was just something she did or if the entire population of the dream world, which seemed to be which seemed to be no more than ten sentient beings, wore black corduroy all over the place. With that thought, I changed into them in the bathroom that was connected to the room.

Luckily, the blisters only went up to my knees. But they really hurt and itched at the same time and every time I scratched at them they would rip off like little scabs and start bleeding. It wasn't fun. To get my mind off of that, I decided that I would IM Genvieve.

"Iris, O Goddess of the Rainbow," I said, "please accept my offering."

I threw one of the drachmas into the rainbow, and it vanished.

"Genvieve, Camp Half-Blood." The mist swirled around, and a picture of Genvieve appeared. She was sitting on a bunk in a cabin that I didn't recognize with a girl about my age that I didn't recognize. The bed spread that she was sitting on had poppies on it. What was up with the poppies today? Genvieve and said unknown girl were tossing mini-marshmallows in the air and trying to catch them in their mouths. Genvieve noticed the IM right before I was about to say something.

"Ula!" she exclaimed. She examined the IM, then said, "Where are you? It's night here. Poppy and I are hanging out in her cabin since we didn't feel like going to the campfire."

"I'm in the dream world," I said. Even more poppies! And this time it's a demigod! "and time here doesn't really match up with your time. Nice to meet you, Poppy." Poppy smiled, and nodded her thanks.

"The dream world? That sounds cool. And you're loosing your accent!" Genvieve said.

"Yeah. I tend to loose it quickly when I have spent time in the country before. When I go back to Australia my friends will probably bother me about my 'American' accent. And remember those pants and the shirt that I found in my cabin right before I left?" I asked. She nodded, and I continued, "Well, I'm not sure what's wrong, but the pants are all messed up and they cut up the lower half of my legs."

"That's _stupide._ Nevertheless, I really wish I was on the quest with you and Zeke…," she said and sort of winced when she only said two names, not all three that set out. I winced too. Poppy had probably heard about what had happened and therefore didn't say anything.

"What's happening over there?" I asked, trying to change the subject.

"Not much, though the few things that are happening aren't good. The Apollo and Brizo cabins nearly got in a fight," she said. That wasn't good. The Apollo cabin and Brizo cabin were grouped together often since they were the two biggest cabins. **(A/N Not sure if I have said this before, but Brizo is the goddess of sailors.) **"Basically tensions are running pretty high. By now most of the people know that the big three are fighting, and they're starting to take sides. It worries me." I frowned.

"Well, I think that we're going to try and see the Oneroi and the other gods and goddesses that are against the argument, whatever it's about. Let's hope it doesn't take long," I said, not lightening the mood at all. "You know what, I've seen poppies everywhere today. They're all over the dream world, and then I meet a person that's named poppy."

"It's weird how coincidences work, huh?" Poppy said while smiling a small smile, "I even know some things about poppies. My dad is Hypnos, the god of sleep."

"That's cool," I said.

"Yeah. Sometimes if you present a good argument to either my dad or the Oneroi and ask for them, they will give you seeds to the red poppy plant. They're powerful, but I don't know why or how," Poppy said. I stared at her.

"How in the _monde _did you learn that?" Genvieve asked. I assumed that monde meant world in French, just like how stupide meant stupid in French. I knew the latter because she had called people stupide before. Poppy's smile vanished.

"A dream," she said uncomfortably.

"That's okay, I guess. I'll mention it if we give the Oneroi a run for their money," I said, giving her a smile. She looked relieved.

"We should go," Genvieve said, "the campfire will end soon and people will wonder where we are. _A bientot._" She then waved her hand through the message. I sat there, thinking about what a weird conversation that had been. I decided that I may as well IM my aunt before I either had to go somewhere or I lost my nerve.

"Iris, O Goddess of the Rainbow," I said yet again, "accept my offering."

And again, I tossed a drachma in and watched as it disappeared.

"Lisa Trent. Sydney, Australia," I announced, and watched as the rainbow swirled around to reveal my Aunt. After she had married my uncle, my Aunt had kept her maiden name, Trent. She never said why, but I think it was in remembrance of my mum. My Aunt turned around in the kitchen to resume washing dishes, but stopped when she caught sight of the IM.

"Penguin! How's life at camp going?" my Aunt asked happily, using the nickname she gave me when I was little. When I was five or six, we went to Sydney Aquarium and I was obsessed with the Little Penguins. They were still my favorite animal, and she still called me that. I didn't mind as long as nobody heard her say it.

"Hi, Aunt!" I said, glad that I had decided to IM her, "I'm good! But I'm not at Camp."

"What? Where are you then?" she asked, being all paranoid about it.

"I'm in the dream world. I actually got a quest."

"That's great, penguin, but you have to be careful. Quests are dangerous," she said. I rolled my eyes good-naturedly. She faked a sigh then said, "I'm guessing that you have found out who your parent is. If you don't mind telling me, I'd like to know. We met him once before, but he didn't bother to tell us who he was."

"Poseidon," I said happily. My Aunt smiled.

"I thought so. I should tell you something else as far as your family history goes as well, that is, if you haven't already figured it out," she said.

"If you're talking about the fact that grandma and grandpa were demigods, then I've figured it out. Who are they, and why didn't you tell me that before?" I asked her.

"I didn't tell you before because of the same reasons why I didn't tell you that your father was a Greek god. First, you probably wouldn't have believed me, and second, it would have made it a lot more dangerous for you. I didn't know that my own parents were demigods until they told me shortly after…" _my mom died_, I silently added. "As to who their parents were," she continued on, "They both had mothers that were goddesses. Khione **(A/N Chione is the same as Khione. They're just different ways of spelling it) **and Iris were my grandmothers. Rainbows and Ice," she added.

"That's nice to know," I said. My Aunt turned as she heard someone coming up the stairs.

"Penguin, I've got to go. Your uncle is coming, and I don't want to know how he would react to me speaking into thin air," she said, and I laughed as I imagined his reaction.

"Bye," I said.

"Bye, and be sure to IM me soon. I want to make sure that your Quest is okay and that you're okay," she said very quickly before the door to the basement opened and she was forced to terminate the message. I sighed.

"Penguin?" Zeke asked, laughing, from the hallway. Oh, great. I'd managed to keep the whole penguin thing a secret for years, and of course now _he _had to the one who heard it.

"Were you eavesdropping?" I asked, trying to keep the attention away from what would probably become my new nickname. He blushed.

"I was going to talk to you, but you were in the middle of an IM and I figured that I would wait until you were done with it, and then I heard your Aunt call you Penguin," he explained hastily.

"Go away," I said, then stomped over to the door and shut it, the scabs on my legs hurting with every step. I stalked back over to the bad and plopped down on it. Now not only did I have to find a way to fix this scab issue with my legs, I also had to deal with people calling me Penguin.

**Huzzah! I have finished it! It took a while, though the time isn't bad since I just started it two days ago. I was too busy fighting Eris and being lazy to start it sooner. It probably would've been started sooner but my cousin, Nox, has a broken computer and I volunteered to help her with the second chapter of Alexandria the Great. The Little Penguin is an actual species of penguin, just so you know. And the French that Genvieve adds into her dialogue is from Google translate, so tell me if it's incorrect.  
**

**Disclaimer: I don't own PJO. My friends don't own PJO. My cats don't own PJO. Only RR owns PJO. That's right- I DON'T OWN IT! I only own some of the OCs, some of the ideas, and the plot! Yay!**

**Review if you liked the chapter! Or penguins!**


	16. Fairy Floss and Visions

**Chapter Sixteen**

I was lying on my stomach on the bed while listening to my iPod. It seemed like I had been using it a ton lately, which was weird considering the fact that the past couple weeks had probably been the busiest of my life. It was on shuffle, and Don't Stop Believing came on. I quickly changed it, not wanting to listen to what used to be my favorite song. Someone knocked on the door. Figuring it going to be Zeke wanting to bother me about the whole 'Penguin' thing, I decided not to answer it.

"Hello?" came a woman's voice from the hallway. Okay, so it wasn't Zeke. It wouldn't be good if I was rude to whoever it was, so I got up and answered it. To my surprise, I didn't even know who the person was. When I opened the door, I saw a tall, thin woman with dark red hair and multicolored eyes.

"G' Day… I'm sorry, but if I'm supposed to know you, I don't," I said after briefly wondering who the heck she was. I stared at her as I said this, and I realized how she sort of reminded me of someone, though I wasn't sure who. The woman laughed.

"You haven't met me, though you would know who I am. I was near Phantasos when Lacey informed him of the issue you had with the gift, and I decided to come and see what I could do about it. Oh, and I'm Iris," she said. _That's _who she reminded me of. She looked a lot like my Aunt, and even more like my mum had.

"Nice to meet you," I said after a short pause. She looked me over and then, to my everlasting surprise, she hugged me. After a small hesitation, I hugged her back. Most of the reason why I hugged her was because she reminded me so much of my mum.

"I can't tell you how much I've wanted to meet you, Penguin," she said happily. That was weird, especially to think that she must've been watching me before to know that nickname. Or she learned it today the same way Zeke found out about it. With my luck, I would never be able to get rid of the nickname.

"Um… well, I can't say that I've wanted to meet you since I didn't even know you existed until about a week or so ago, but as I said, it's nice to meet you," I said awkwardly. She smiled at me apologetically, and then gestured for me to head into my guest room. I turned in, and she came along as well.

"How has the armor worked so far?" she asked me.

"Amour?" I asked. What was she talking about?

"I take it that you didn't figure it out yet," she said as she sat down on the edge of the fountain, "The UnderArmor shirt that I gave you, the one you are wearing at this very moment, was a gift from me. I left you a note that said that the clothes were armor."

"You did?" I asked, not remembering that at all, "Well, you have now. I must have forgotten somehow." Iris nodded.

"And I also came because of what happened to your legs. You say the enchanted pants did that?" she asked.

"Yeah, I think so. It didn't hurt until I took them off when Lacey noticed that my leg was 'leaking'," I said. Iris frowned.

"The pants were not from me, though I do know who they are from. I will have to look into this, and possibly bring it up at the council."

"The council?" I asked.

"Yes! That was another thing I have to tell you about," she said, her smile returning, "In a while all of the gods and goddesses that are openly against this crazy war are going to meet at a council. It will be held in the throne room, and when the time arrives for the meeting to commence Lacey will come and fetch both you and Zeke."

"Okay," I said, thinking it over. It would be good to see this, and the chance to ask about those poppy seeds could arise. Another thing I was thinking about was why Iris was being so nice to me. She had several kids back at Camp, and most gods don't socialize with their children that much. While I was thinking this, I remembered that someone back at Camp had told me that gods and goddesses usually had the ability to read minds.

"Yes, we can read minds," Iris said to me, "And I'm being nice because you're essentially one of my children. Your father, among many other powerful figures, doesn't have much time to spend on his children. I don't do many things other than make sure messages go through rainbows, so I take it upon myself to make sure to spend as much time with my children that I can muster up an excuse for. Many others believe this, but it's very important to know your family and friends. Just keep remembering that, and don't stop believing." With that she whisked out of the room, and I was alone. As I sat by myself on the corner of the fountain, I realized that the scabs on my legs had started to tingle instead of itch. I looked down, and saw that the rainbow of the fountain, which was drifting over me since I was sitting in the mist, was healing the scabs.

I sat still in amazement as the skin knit itself together. When it was finished I could still see faint scars on my legs, but they felt as good as new. I then turned, and caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. I was dirty to the point of looking like a homeless person and my hair was in layers of knots. I stood up and went to take a shower.

oooo

After I put the clothes I had been wearing back on, I tried my best to brush my hair. It had been in a braid since we left Phoenix, and it was at the point of no return. The top part wasn't bad since the braid had slipped down but from the shoulder down it looked sort of like a dreadlock. There was no way that was going to come out.

I got my sword off of my wrist, intending to cut most of my hair off. I looked down at the sword and had one of those weird instances where something suddenly clicks. A bit earlier, Iris had said don't stop believing, which was what I sang to Susa. We were on a journey, life was a journey, and the band that sang that song was named Journey. Watching the reflection of myself holding it with my eyes the color of the red poppies, I knew what I wanted to name my sword.

Before I could change my mind, I cut off the knot of hair. After I threw it away, I proceeded out of the bathroom just as Lacey came in to my guest room.

"Your hair ran away!" Lacey said, surprised. I wondered to myself why she always words things in such a strange way. Like how she said my leg was 'leaking' when it was bleeding.

"It had no choice," I said.

"That's horrible! Unless it was a pest," she said while nodding solemnly, "Pesky hair needs to run away."

"Uh… sure," I mumbled.

"But that's not why I'm here! There's going to be a really cool council thingy soon, and my dad said that I was to take you and what's-his-name to the part of the dream world dedicated to dreams of humans to get something to eat first," she said, then bolted out of the door. I followed her, albeit a good bit slower. When we got to Zeke's door she started knocking on it. Zeke answered it and it looked like he had the same idea to take a shower that I had, though I had dried my hair instantly with my water-powers while his was still sopping wet.

"Repeated message! There's going to be a really cool council thing soon, and my dad said that I was to take both you and Ula to the part of the dream world dedicated to dreams of humans to get something to eat!" Lacey managed to say with one breath.

"Okay," Zeke said, shrugging. He then asked me, "What happened to your hair?"

"It ran away," I said, quoting Lacey. Lacey led us out of a different wind of the castle that was just as impressive as the other part had been. We came out of a large archway and into the garden, and I was surprised to see a large, dark swirling river coming out of a cave in the mountainside. On closer inspection, I noticed that there were a few unrecognizable shadow figures with red eyes guarding the entrance to the cave.

"What the Hades is that supposed to be?" Zeke asked.

"That's the dream world's last link to the Underworld. This is the River Lethe, which runs through Hypnos's realm. They use it down there to wash away the memories of the people that are going to be reborn, and it still has the same properties while it's here. It wouldn't be wise to touch it," she added.

"So anything from the Underworld could creep through that entrance?" Zeke asked.

"No," Lacey said, "That's why we have the nightmares guarding that cave."

"Wait, those are nightmares?" I asked. They just looked sort of like black blobs.

"Yep! Phobetor creates them to keep out uninvited guests, such as a child of Erebus or Hades for example. The nightmares would attack and then capture them, if not kill them. But there are a few exceptions. If a child of any of the Oneiroi, Hypnos, Thanatos, or Iris wanted to get through, they probably could unless Phobetor wishes otherwise. Oh! The main entrance to the dream world usually has some pretty savage nightmares guarding it from non-gods too, but Morpheus knew that you people were coming and ordered him to remove them. Phobetor wasn't happy about it, but he'll get over it." By the time Lacey was done talking, we were in a field that was empty aside from a lot of sky-blue poppies. Lacey took Fred the fedora off of her head.

"Please not the hot air balloon again," I said. Lacey frowned.

"You spoil all the fun, don't you?" she asked grumpily, like a two-year-old who didn't get their way.

"Pretty much," Zeke said, laughing. I scowled at him. "Penguin," he said teasingly. I scowled some more, but he just laughed it off. Lacey took no notice but started to hum some random song.

"Well," Lacey interrupted, "since I can't think of anything fun to do with Fred that doesn't involve flying, I think I should summon some dreams to take us there." Without waiting for a response, she turned Fred into a whistle and blew into it as hard as she could. It must've been like a dog whistle because I couldn't hear anything.

Not long after that, three grey-purple blobs came out of a forest of birch trees that was on the opposite side of the Lethe.

"Those are dreams," Lacey informed us, "And the two that are going to give you a ride are going to take whatever form they want. I'm really good friends with the one that will give me a ride, and that one likes to manifest itself as a unicow." I was going to ask her what a 'unicow' was but I figured that I would find out soon enough. Not long after that, the dream that was closest to Lacey turned into a cow with bright pink spots and a horn. One of the other dreams turned into a giraffe with a saddle, then the final one turned into a large sheep that was colored like the night sky; navy blue with little twinkling lights in its wool.

"I call the sheep thing!" I announced. After all, it was closer to the ground. The giraffe looked slightly dangerous.

"That star sheep has feelings too!" Lacey said unhappily. Oh, great.

"Oh," I said sarcastically while addressing the sheep, "I'm sorry, star sheep, for assuming you were just a sheep-thing." Lacey looked pleased by the apology, while Zeke was trying to hold back laughter yet again.

"Let's go," Lacey said while she jumped onto her unicow. I hesitantly got onto the star sheep, though I quickly realized that it didn't really feel like I was on an actual animal. It was cold and the wool sort of felt like the slime you can make where if you hit it you meet resistance but if you move your hand slowly it will sink in. As soon as we were all on the dream animals, they started to move. That was another thing they didn't have in common with real animals. When they started forward where we were headed stayed in focus while the edges of my vision warped. I think that we must have been moving really fast, but it wasn't scary at all.

Within a minute or so we came to a halt. We were standing at the top of the hill near where the dark River Lethe emptied out into a red ocean, but that wasn't what caught my attention. What caught my attention was a sprawling, gleaming city that was right next to us. The land was just grassy plains, but then it switched into tall skyscrapers and temples and, well, anything you could ever dream of. There was even a rollercoaster weaving around some of the tallest buildings.

As we stood there in awe, the sky suddenly went dark. Zeke and I were both fairly startled.

"Don't worry," Lacey said casually, "It just switched from noon to midnight. The only thing that means is more people are dreaming about night than they are day, which is actually pretty unusual. Let's go!" she announced, then let us into the city of dreams. Most of the people from the dream world looked like dreams as well. There were a few that looked normal, but there were many that looked like elves or like they were 2D.

"Are all of the dreams here the good kind?" Zeke asked.

"All dreams are good," Lacey said absently while surveying our surroundings, "but if you mean the kinds that aren't nightmares, then yes."

"Then where do the nightmares go?" I questioned after a moment of thought. Lacey frowned a little, then raised her arm and pointed a good way down the coast of the red ocean. I squinted and was able to see a flashing light, probably a lighthouse or something.

"That's the halfway mark," she said, "between the nightmare realm and the rest of the dream world. There's a city of nightmares, too. I've never been there, nor would I ever want to go there. It's full of murderers and beasts. Same goes for most of that realm, though there are a few places that are okay. Like the place where Phobetor's daughter lives. Oh look! We're near the market!" And though what she was telling us was interesting, the market was even better. There were tons of vender's stalls, and some of those interesting things smelled really good.

"What do you use to pay them?" I asked, wondering if I would have to use some absurd amount of drachmas just to buy something to eat.

"You don't have to pay them since we aren't dreams. Also, in case you're wondering, the food here is plenty safe to eat. There are no rules about it, unlike the Underworld," she finished, then pranced away to whom knows where. I briefly looked around, then decided what I was going to eat first.

"I'm going to get fairy floss," I told Zeke, who looked confused. I sighed then said, "Cotton candy." With that I went over to the vendor who was selling it. The cart looked like it had come from a fair, and so did the guy. He handed me a stick of it, then I left to find what else there was. I ate as I walked, looking around at the booths. I was surprised to see that there was even a stall selling celestial bronze weapons along with other things you would typically see with a demigod. However, there wasn't a shopkeeper there, so I didn't bother to really look at anything. I finished the fairy floss, got a gyro from a Greek stand, and then went to look for Lacey and Zeke.

"There you are!" Lacey said from behind me. I spun around on instinct. Zeke was already with Lacey.

"I didn't hear you coming," I said.

"Most people don't. I want to show you people a place!" she announced, then dragged us along with her. We went up a street that was rather steep. Near the top of the hill it was on, she turned down a different side street and looped partially around a sky scraper. There was another hill in front of us, but on top of that hill was a huge Greek temple with dark marble pillars that shone in the moonlight. Lacey marched us towards the temple, then led us inside.

"This temple is dedicated to the Oneroi, though that's not why we're in here. This temple is on the far edge of the city and it has an unobstructed view of most everything," Lacey said, and then led out of the back of the temple. The view was breathtaking. You could see the red ocean, the beach, the forest, the mountains, _and _the castle all from one position. Along with that, it wasn't even on a cliff.

"It's for things like these that I stay in the dream world. Along with the lack of reality, it has wonderful, unearthly beauty that can't be described…" she said her voice trailing off. I gazed at a particular star in the sky for a while. While I watched it, the world seemed to swirl until it seemed like I wasn't myself.

_I was in a valley or possibly a cave, though it wasn't dark. In fact, it was really bright. The reason why it was so bright was because of all the sunlight reflecting off of piles of snow. The walls were grey stone, and I could hear a muted voice echoing from the walls. The voice stopped when another interrupted it. The second voice sounded peeved. I couldn't make out anything the voices were saying, so I ventured to where I thought they were coming from. I steered down a narrow passageway through the valley, but was forced to stop near the end of it. I couldn't move, though I really wanted to. The voices were definitely coming from the next room over, but they were still indistinguishable. For a few moments I stood there. Soon enough, someone I recognized stepped into view. Seth's white-blonde hair was bright in the sunlight, just like the snow. He was arguing with the person that was out of my view. He didn't look angry at all, in fact, he looked desperate. I wondered what was happening. As far as I knew, Seth was friends with pretty much everyone. While I watched, the world faded from view again, only to be replaced with another place I had never been to before._

_A loud crash sounded, like a dish dropping and breaking apart into many tiny pieces. The source of the noise was undoubtedly from the old glass medicine bottle that was sitting in front of the girl. She was reading some slightly yellowed papers that she held in her hands. There was only a single light on, so it was hard to see her features. Her hair was long, white, and it looked suspiciously like the fairy floss I had earlier. Her skin was pale, almost white as well. _If she had the red Kool-Aid eyes, _I thought, _she could pass for a vampire. _My attention returned to her as she looked up. Her eyes were not red, though they were equally creepy. The left eye was a light ice blue, while the other was a deep brown. She set the paper down, then left._

I blinked really hard when I saw the star again.

"We should go," Lacey said, dragging us back into the temple. We went sideways past the statues of the Oneroi, not to the entrance that we came in from. Lacey opened a door, revealing a different hallway. I hadn't remembered hallways coming from the temple, but entered nevertheless. Once we were through, I recognized where we were from the view out of the windows.

"We're back at the castle…" I said, "Why didn't we just come out this way in the first place?" I asked. Lacey smirked.

"Because that wouldn't have given you the same experience, of course," she said, still smirking. She walked around a corner and disappeared. Zeke and I followed, not wanting to get lost. After a turn or two, we came to the entrance to the throne room.

There were numerous gods and goddesses already in the room. To be equal with the others, the Oneroi had decided to stand. However, every last immortal was around nine or so feet tall, so you couldn't mistake them for a mortal. All of the gods and goddesses looked interesting. Iris was there, easy to recognize with her dark red hair and brightly colored outfit. She was standing next to who I thought was Morpheus; he looked like he was in his twenties and he had two large, black wings attached to his back. Going counterclockwise, there was a blonde guy with a fedora who I guessed was Phantasos, then Nike, who looked the same as when I saw her in New York.

After that, there was the place where Lacey, Zeke, and I were standing. To our right was a woman with a dog's head and was wearing a dress that looked like it had been made out of herbs. Finally, there was a man that must've been Phobetor. He had long, black hair and soot-smeared skin, like he had just been in a fire or explosion.

Not long after we entered, a final goddess came up behind us. Her skin was nearly translucent, and her left half looked albino, with a pink eye and white hair. The other side had black hair and a black eye. On the whole, she reminded me of someone, though I wasn't sure who.

"Good, we're all here," Morpheus said, "Now, as to the reason why we're here."

"The Big Three are fighting again over something that shouldn't have been that significant," Phobetor said, then looked over at us, or really, me. "Do you know why they are fighting?" he asked. Zeke and I simultaneously shook our heads. I heard Phobetor sigh a little. The others looked slightly upset too, aside from the two-sided woman and the one with the dog head. Well, I couldn't really tell if the one with the dog's head was upset since she had a dog's head.

"They're fighting about Ula," Morpheus said. I stared blankly.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Before last year," Morpheus started to explain, "The Big Three had a pact where they couldn't have any children. It started after World War II after a few powerful demigods nearly turned the world upside-down. After the pact, they didn't have any children until Zeus broke it by fathering Thalia, who is now in the huntresses. Poseidon had Percy a few years after that. After all of the Great Prophecy was said and done, Percy saved the world. Instead of becoming immortal, Percy chose to make sure all of the children of all of the gods were claimed and had a place to stay in Camp Half-Blood. The pact that the Big Three made about children was called off as well. However, it seems as if Percy wasn't the only time Poseidon broke the pact. When your father claimed you, Ula, it made both Hades and Zeus angry."

"Why were they so angry?" I asked, "After all, the pact has ended now anyway." Phobetor was the one to reply this time.

"That seems to be the issue. They're all angry about things that no longer matter. As you discovered, Ares and Eris want war. Eris made sure that the other gods and goddesses would take sides to the argument. By the time we opposed them about how foolish the war would be, each was set on having their own side win as well as too stubborn to admit that they shouldn't have picked sides so quickly."

"We are gathered here," Nike added, "not to create our own side of the mess, but to try to stop _all _of the sides. Being the goddess of victory, I can't take sides. Victory is something that you have to create by yourself." After her little speech, there was some silence for a moment.

"So…," Zeke said, "what are we supposed to do about this?"

"That seems to be the problem," Iris said. "None of us know what we're supposed to do. We're all considered to be minor gods and goddesses, so the Olympians won't listen. However, Eris and Ares still need to be stopped."

"_I think I may have a solution to that," _someone said. I couldn't tell who had said that, but then I realized it had been in my head. Zeke seemed to have come to the same conclusion, so we looked around the room. All of the immortals, as well as Lacey, were looking at the goddess with the dog head.

"What is your idea, Hecate?" Phobetor asked. So that was Hecate, Susa's mum. I didn't really see the family resemblance other than the height, but that was most likely because of the dog head.

"_Melinoe and I have talked about it and we have concluded that most of us don't have children that can try to stop the jokers who have played their cards. As you know, I lost my own daughter to their deeds. Nike's children can't take sides. Morpheus and Iris, your children are all at camp, and I would seriously doubt that Chiron would let them leave. Phobetor, your only child has been in her spot in the Nightmare realm for hundreds and hundreds of years, so it wouldn't be wise to bring her back into reality. Then when you add Lacey in, all have been accounted for other than Melinoe," _she said, then turned to Melinoe. When I looked at Melinoe, I noticed that she had switched forms. Her new form looked disturbingly familiar, with platinum blonde hair and multicolored eyes. With a pang, I realized that it looked exactly like my mum as well as my Aunt. As I continued to stare, I noticed that she was identical to my mum, with the birthmark on her hand and everything. Zeke looked really unhappy about her appearance too, though I have no idea why he would get upset over Melinoe looking like my mum.

"I have one child," Melinoe said in a chilling voice that was not my mum's, "who lives in Savannah, Georgia. Contacting her was an issue because I am not allowed into the mortal world for another seven years. Hades only lets me out for one week to haunt every twenty years. However, I am the goddess of ghosts. It will cost me to remove all of my normal ghosts, but with Hecate's help I am able to send one ghost into the mortal world with a purpose. I will have that ghost bring my daughter back to this world where she can be further instructed."

"That solves that problem," Phantasos said while playing with his fingers. I noticed that he had drawn little smiley faces on each. It looked like he was making a finger puppet show.

"What are _we_ supposed to do to stop the Big Three from fighting?" I asked. Stopping Ares and Eris wouldn't make the other gods and goddesses admit that they made a mistake.

"That," Morpheus said, "is something we can't help you with. It is, after all, your quest. We can't alter that." I remembered a few things.

"What does it mean if I had a dream in the dream world?" I asked the Oneroi, "Did you send it?" They shook their heads.

"We don't directly control dreams of visions that are already in the dream world. They start here and it's our job to send them out into the mortal world. Why do you ask?" Morpheus questioned. I had asked because of the visions I had, but there was a way to turn it to my advantage and avoid more questioning.

"Can I have a poppy seed from that poppy plant?" I asked while pointing to the sacred poppy behind Morpheus's throne. The three Oneroi exchanged glances. They looked a bit surprised, though they didn't object immediately. After a few moments, Morpheus lifted himself into the air with his midnight-black wings and retrieved two small, black seeds.

"Be careful," he cautioned as he handed them to me. Lacey and most of the other gods and goddesses looked surprised. Melinoe gave me a piercing gaze, like she could see right into my core. It was unnerving, especially since she looked like my mum.

"Good luck!" Nike announced suddenly. I caught a smile from Iris, then the world swirled just like when I had the vision. When my eyesight cleared, I was standing on a street across from an old looking building with a statue in front of it. The statue looked like it was of George Washington, but I'm no expert. The building had a tall steeple and looked vaguely familiar.

"Have I seen this before?" I asked Zeke, who was standing next to me.

"Most likely. It's Independence Hall, where the Liberty Bell used to be. We're in Philadelphia," he said.

**Dun Dun Dun! They're in Philadelphia now.**

**OMZ I'm so sorry I haven't updated in… what has it been? A month at least. I'm sorry! Don't kill me! This chapter is looooooooooong with 5415 words and it puts this story over the 40,000 mark, so you need to review! Ula is doing the disclaimer this time.**

**Ula: You abandoned us! D=**

**Me: No I didn't! I'm back now!**

**Ula: Whatever. SomniumAstrum does not own PJO. She owns myself, Zeke, Susa, Seth, and Lacey. And the plot of Gem of the Sea. Poppy, Genvieve, and Landon are owned by SpiritusAstrum. IF YOU LIKE GEM OF THE SEA YOU NEED TO READ **_**FLOWER OF SLEEP **_**BY SPIRITUSASTRUM, **_**IN BLACK AND WHITE **_**BY MINIMUSASTRUM, AND **_**ALEXANDRIA THE GREAT **_**BY NOXASTRUM! It will pay off!**

**~REVIEW~**


	17. Seeing Random People in Random Places

**Chapter Seventeen**

"What do you think we're supposed to do now?" I asked Zeke.

"No idea. How about we go find something to eat and figure it out while we're eating?" he suggested. I shrugged, but went along with it. We aimlessly wandered around for a while before we finally decided to get something at a Dunkin' Donuts.

Using some of the mortal money we brought with us, I got a chocolate donut and Zeke got a glazed one. I didn't know how much time had elapsed between when I ate the gyro and cotton candy in the dream world, but it seemed like a lifetime ago. While Zeke started to methodically rip bits of his donut off to eat, I started to think about how much of the quest we had finished. I repeated this question to Zeke.

"Well," he said while wiping his fingers on a napkin, "the first part was 'Three converge in the Attic, the cause of a simple allusion, to go on a mission that is diplomatic, yet may fail from the exclusion'."

"Three of us met in the Attic because of what Susa mentioned about the drachmas," I said, thinking about that moment. It all seemed like such a long time ago. How long had it really been? Probably only a few days.

"Yeah, and I guess this could be counted as diplomatic since we're trying to stop a war and all. And it could fail because Hades wouldn't listen to us because there's nobody to represent his side. We didn't include someone from that side, which could cause possible failure," he finished. My donut was long gone by now, so I was playing around with my napkin.

"Then next part goes 'Southwest must be the search, to stop the one who plays a joker, one will be lost to the birch, all the cause of the invoker'. We went southwest. We lost someone," I said, cringing a little, "but I don't know what they meant by birch. I have no idea who they mean by joker, but the invoker could be Eris. Ares's IQ is probably too low to 'invoke' anyone." Zeke laughed even though my joke wasn't really that funny. In fact, it wasn't much of a joke at all.

"Probably. I don't know who the joker is either," he said, then the laughter was wiped off of his face, "But I do know what they meant by birch. The tree we were next to when Susa died was a paper birch…"

"Okay," I said, then hastily continued onward, "the next stanza said 'Some will help from the dream world, to get to the place of keystone, but without the Queen of the Underworld, their fates will be set in bone'. Well, Persephone helped us get off to Michigan so Hades wouldn't kill us."

"We got help from the dream world, but what do they mean by keystone?" Zeke asked. I shrugged yet again. It seemed like a shrugging sort of day. It was hot and humid outside, and through the window I could see little heat waves coming off of the pavement. Of course, the temperature didn't really bother me.

"Then the last part was 'They find what they must ration, but wouldn't if it weren't for the flower, a quest against the others' passion, yet it may fail even with willpower'," I said while still watching all of the little heat waves on the pavement. I had a friend who called them 'snakes'.

"The last two sentences are blindingly obvious, but what about finding stuff we have to ration from a flower? That doesn't even make sense," he said, frowning.

"The poppy seeds from the dream world," I explained, "are what we have to ration. They're from a flower, and I found out about them from a flower." Poppy had told me about them, and I guess that she would've counted as a flower because of her name, though I hadn't made the connection until just now. I jumped when the chime on the door went off, announcing more customers.

"Zeke? Ula?" came a familiar voice. I started to turn around, but Zeke saw who it was first and therefore answered before I had a chance.

"Seth?" he questioned. Seth was there along with an Asian guy that seemed vaguely familiar and a skinny blonde girl that I had never seen before.

"What are you two doing here?" Seth asked us.

"I could ask the same thing," I replied.

"Well, the explanation is long at best," Seth said. He sat down next to Zeke in our booth. "But my guess would've been that you two are on a date," he said, laughing. I made a face while Zeke just pushed Seth off of the seat. Even though Seth is way taller and probably weighs more, Seth was laughing hard enough that a kindergartener could've done it.

"Who even laughs at their own jokes that much anyway?" I said, trying to turn away the point of conversation. The blonde girl sat down next to me. She was smiling, though I wasn't exactly sure why. She was probably laughing at Seth since he was being a hooligan again.

"I'm Alexandria," the girl said.

"I'm Ula," I said in return, "What cabin are you in? Athena?" It seemed pretty likely, though she didn't have grey eyes. Her eyes were the color of a penny, though they sort of hid behind her hair and her glasses.

"No," she said, "I'm in the Muse cabin. My mother is Clio, the goddess of history."

"Cool," I replied. Seth had started to get up off of the floor because of the looks the cashier was giving him. It wasn't the 'I'm curious about what you're doing' look; it was the 'I'm going to call the cops on you' look, which isn't good.

"But really," Seth said once everyone had calmed down a little, "What are you doing? Last I heard you two were in the dream world. Of course, I guess the dream world could be around here… didn't think of that."

"It's not here. Well, it wasn't here. But we came out here," I explained. They all gave me blank stares, so I shrugged. "That's the best I can do."

"It doesn't matter," Alexandria said, "but it would probably be useful if you told us what has happened to you. Our prophecy wasn't that descriptive and we're here on a wild guess, and anything could help us."

For the next half hour or so we shared what had happened with them. Zeke and I took turns telling them about our former plan of going to the Underworld, how we ended up getting there after being chased by an insane mob, and about why Hades wouldn't listen to us. Later we found out that Ares and Eris had been behind all of this when they killed Susa, and then Zeke and I went to the dream world.

Then Seth told us about what had happened since we left. Apparently, there had been two new campers, Alexandria being one of them and Poppy the other. Stress at camp was pretty high due to the fact that everyone's parents were starting to fight with one another. He said that there had nearly been a fight between the Apollo and Brizo cabins. To top it all off, the camp had been attacked by crazy monsters yesterday evening. Alexandria had killed the Amphisbaena, which if I understood correctly was a giant snake with heads at both ends. Then to top it off, Alexandria had received a quest last night. And it had only been her first day at camp.

"So," Seth finished, "Since Alex didn't know anyone besides Brianna and Aislin, who weren't allowed to go, I volunteered and Jake was volunteered."

"Who's Jake?" I asked after a pause.

"Him," Alexandria said while pointing to the table closest to our booth. There was only one person sitting in it, and I realized that I saw him come in with Seth and Alexandria. He didn't say anything, but that was probably because he wasn't paying any attention to us. He had a lollypop in his mouth, which really looked bizarre when paired with the sort of street artist style he had going. Of course, he didn't look like he would be good at even spray painting buildings. "JAKE," Alexandria said loudly to get his attention.

"What?" he snapped.

"Do you have anything to add?" Alex asked him.

"Yeah. Let's stop wasting time and actually _do _something instead of hanging around in a freaking donut shop," he replied irritably. Looks like someone didn't want to be here. Well, I didn't really want to be here either, but I wasn't _that _crabby about it. I would've probably thought about this more and become even more off track if Alex hadn't talked to me.

"I like your bracelet," she told me.

"Thanks," I responding, "but it's not really a bracelet. It's actually my sword."

"Awesome! I don't really have my own weapon. Just a couple of borrowed knives. What's your sword's name?" she asked. I hesitated to tell her, though I decided that I may as well.

"Journey," I said. Zeke looked surprised. It was named after a band, but not because I liked that band. It was because of Don't Stop Believing. Alexandria didn't know any of this, so she just said it was cool and started to play with a chip in one of her fingernails. There was a small stretch of silence after this.

"Where are you going to go after this?" Zeke asked Seth.

"No idea," he said.

"Actually," Alexandria said, "I think we're going to Baton Rouge."

"Why?" Seth asked her. I was wondering too, though I didn't want to ask. Alexandria was just one of those people that made you feel as if you couldn't question what she said. Some people are born leaders, I guess.

"I'll explain later, but for now we should get going," she said, getting up out of the booth. Alex looked really determined about something. "I'm going to get something to eat to take with me. You want something?" she asked Seth.

"Sure," Seth said before Alex walked towards the counter. "I feel like we're part of that National Treasure movie," he said. Zeke and I both laughed. "Alex keeps finding clues and whatnot from things that most other people don't even acknowledge."

"She really seems like she should be a child of Athena," I said. I was met with nods of agreement. Alex came back and handed Seth a glazed donut. Seth got out of the booth too, and they started to walk out of the building. Jake followed them out silently, like some sort of shadow.

"What cabin is Jake in?" I asked Zeke once they were out of sight. I was expecting some sort of strange shadowy deity, like Thanatos or Nyx.

"Tyche, the goddess of fame and luck. He's been at camp for a long time; longer than they've been accepting kids of minor gods and goddesses. He was in the Hermes cabin for at least three years."

"Fame and luck?" I questioned.

"Yeah. He's just about the luckiest person to ever live and people have a tendency to pick him out of crowds randomly, but from what I hear of it he hates it all," Zeke said while using a pen to doodle on the back of his napkin.

"What kind of bird is that?" I asked him, eyeing the napkin. He looked up from the drawing.

"It started out as a pigeon much like the ones outside the window, but I messed up the head. It made it look like a robin, so I'm trying to draw off of memory."

"My middle name is Robin," I said. He looked at me quizzically, probably because he couldn't tell if that meant I was an expert on the bird or because my middle name is actually Robin. "Literally," I announced to clarify the situation. He grinned.

"Nice," he said. After a while of finishing up his robin, he shoved the napkin away. "So what's the plan?" he asked me. I sighed.

"I have no idea," I said glumly. I reached into my zebra stripe backpack and shuffled through what we had. There was next to no money left; certainly not enough to get us out of Philadelphia. There were a lot of drachmas, but they wouldn't do much in the mortal world. The other two items of interest included the stack of baseball cards Nike gave us in New York and the magic poppy seeds from the dream world. What were we supposed to do with either of those?

"Maybe we could sell the baseball cards to someone around here and get money to pay for travel," Zeke suggested. That was the best idea I'd heard yet.

"But where would we go?" I asked. I wish I was like Alex, knowing what I was doing.

"No idea. We could go sightseeing," he said. I didn't respond for a while. We were on a quest. Didn't things happen no matter where we went? The more I thought about it the more I became convinced I was correct. Besides, why did we have to travel all over the USA and not look at anything?

"I guess that would be all right," I said while standing up. I brushed all of the flakes of glaze off of the black corduroy shorts I borrowed from Lacey. They certainly made a statement, though I'm not sure what kind. Probably about questionable fashion tastes; that was Lacey.

Zeke and I walked around Philadelphia for a while before we found an collectables shop. I glanced around the store, looking for the counter. I saw it in the back corner of the room. There was a chubby 20-something year old behind the counter reading some weird magazine.

"Excuse me," I said to the guy.

"What?" he said, looking up. When he saw that we weren't adults, he grumpily said, "Listen kid, I don't want your old trading cards. They're worth nothing."

"Actually," I interjected, "these were my uncle's, but he decided to move out and left them. My mom is a bit low on cash, so she sent me here to sell these baseball cards." I ran through the story I created while we were walking here.

"Let me see them," he said. He took forever to sort through most of them. However, he looked at the very last one and said something along the lines of 'Joe', 'Yankees', and 'heads up'. Then he took the cards into the back, probably to check if they were real. When he came back, he was all worked up.

"Most of these are only worth less than ten bucks each, but this one," he said while pointing to the last card, "is worth about $45,000. I can buy it from you for 35,000. With the others added in on top of that it'd be about $35,500! Deal?" he asked.

"Sure," I said, and he went into the back again and came out with several wads of cash. Then he asked me to sign something. Without a thought, I signed my name.

When we walked out of the store, we had 35,550 American dollars to spend.

"Where do you want to go?" I asked Zeke. He considered this for a moment.

"How does Lake Eerie sound?" he asked me. It sounded perfect. If worst came to worst, I could always just bail us out through the lake. We went to a bus terminal, and bought tickets to Harrisburg. Then we'd take a different bus from there to Eerie. When we seated ourselves on the bus, I started to wonder if we were really supposed to go wherever we wanted.

oooo

I'm glad to say the bus rides were utterly forgettable. No monsters. No creepy ladies. Just… a normal bus ride.

"My legs are all stiff," I complained.

"I wonder why?" Zeke asked sarcastically.

"Where to first?" I asked him once we got out of the bus terminal.

"We could go to the lake," he suggested. The walk would be a bit long, but I didn't mind. We'd already walked an excessive amount on this trip. We walked around for about a half hour before we unanimously agreed that we should stop and eat dinner. It was mid afternoon by then and we hadn't had anything but the donuts earlier today.

We stopped at a pizza café, though neither of us particularly liked pizza. It was considered weird by some of my friends, but I didn't like most junk food.

We each got a slice of pizza; I got cheese and Zeke got pepperoni. I didn't like pepperoni either since it was really greasy. The pizza came on paper plates, but we walked the final four or five blocks to the lake and found a old picnic bench before either of us ate it.

While I was taking a bite, I felt something on my arm. I figured it was a stray frizzy piece of hair, though when I cast my eyes over to it I found that it was a red ant. I hated those things; it itches when they bite you. However, Zeke reached over and brushed it off before I had a chance to do so myself.

"Awww!" I heard someone coo from behind me. I turned around, ready to give whomever said that my best death glare. The woman who had said that looked like she was around twenty or so, and seemed like she was some sort of actress or model. Her hair was long and blonde, framing her heart shaped face. Her eyes were a green-blue-grey-hazel-brown. You'd think it'd be ugly if you mixed all of those colors together, but somehow, it wasn't.

"Who are you?" I asked, though I felt as if I already knew the answer.

"I bet you know," she said while she took a seat next to me at the picnic table. Zeke seemed to know who she was too.

"You're Aphrodite, aren't you?" I asked. Aphrodite beamed a straight, white smile at me.

"What are you two doing here?" she asked innocently.

"What are _you_ doing here?" I countered.

"What do you think I'm doing here?" she asked. I think she was trying to confuse me, but it wasn't working. I've had a lot of friends who responded in questions and double negatives on purpose. One gets used to it after a while.

"What do you think I think you're doing here?" said, starting to get bored with the conversation. Curse you, ADD.

"Aren't you cute?" Aphrodite teased, "I can see why Chanter over here likes you. Unfortunately, the reason why I'm here isn't that adorable." It took me a minute to register the fact that Zeke's last name was Chanter since I'd only heard it once or twice before. As soon as that connected, my initial thought was somewhere along the lines of '_What?_'. But it wouldn't be a good idea to mess up in front of a goddess, so I did my best to shove it to the back of my mind.

"Get to the point. Why are you here?" I questioned. She looked disappointed that I didn't pursue the other topic, though she didn't bring it back up.

"I'm the goddess of love. Frankly, love is everywhere. You may say it is the ruin of cities and the source of heartbreak, but think about it. Would the cities have been there if the people who loved their families didn't want a safe place for them? It makes and breaks the world," she said. I didn't really agree with her, but I didn't interrupt. "As you know, the Big Three are taking sides. I don't think I could take a side. Love can't just be limited to a single group of people!" Aphrodite vented.

"But we're on a quest to stop this stuff from happening," I said.

"Hate to break it to you," she said unhappily, "but you're not helping much." That wasn't good to hear.

"Then don't take a side," Zeke suggested after my fail.

"But we _all_ have to take sides! There's no alternative," she grumped. Apparently she didn't know about the gods and goddesses in the dream world. Maybe she wasn't supposed to know, or the folks in the dream world were afraid of the Olympians knowing. However, I had an idea. I leaned over and fiddled with the pocket of my backpack. In a few minutes, I had the poppy seeds in my hand.

"I don't know how these work," I told Aphrodite while handing them to her, "but I think I should give them to you."

Aphrodite examined them for a while, then looked back up.

"Let's hope this isn't a lost cause," she murmured before she closed her palm and disappeared. The phrase 'lost cause' was sort of cliché, but I clearly remembered the last person I had heard it from. Unfortunately, it had been Susa who said them before we left on the quest. I had asked her what she thought of the situation, she said 'lost cause'. She was usually right. Aphrodite didn't seem to think we would be able to navigate our way to success in our quest either. And on top of that, Aphrodite just told me that Zeke liked me.

Things were starting to get pretty dang complicated.

**Ahhhhh I'm sorry! I haven't updated in two months and two days! D=**

**I just hope you people can forgive me. Want to hear my excuse? There's a giant hole blasted in this part of the plot on top of the fact that I'm sort of supervising all four of the stories that run together. **

**Next chapter should be the end of Part One, though I'm not 100% sure about it. What's Part One, you ask? This Fanfic is divided into two parts. Part One and Part Two. The same goes with the other three fanfics. And then there's going to be a sequel after that. You thought it was almost done, didn't you? Well, not a chance :P**

**Disclaimer: I own most of the plot. I own Zeke, Ula, Susa, Seth, and a plethora of other characters. Alex is owned by NoxAstrum. Jake is shared between myself, Nox, and SpiritusAstrum. Don't ask why, it simply is.**

**I don't know if I deserve your reviews anymore, but if you're feeling nice enough to give me your input, I'd be VERY happy. **

**Please read these if you want to know who these random people are who are about to invade Gem of the sea:**

**Flower of Sleep by SpiritusAstrum.**

**In Black and White by MinimusAstrum.**

**Alexandria the Great by NoxAstrum.**

**Sorry for the extensive A/N, and have a happy Singles Awareness Day (or Valentines Day, for those of you who have boyfriends, girlfriends, ect.)!**


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